NYT Opinion Piece: This Isn’t What Millennial Middle Age Was Supposed To Look Like

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Behind paywall.

But if I can make an assumption based on the article title, it's someone complaining about life being unfair rather than acknowledging the mistakes of individual decisions.

I borrowed $19k for college.

I have paid back $24k.

I still owe almost $15k.

The only mistake I made was listening to every teacher over the years that drilled into my head that if you didn't go to college, you were a loser who would work at McDonalds for life. And of course, having the unfortunate timing of graduating college in 2008 when the whole god damn economy crashed.

Your comment is total out-of-touch Boomer energy. I wish a case of c.diff upon you.

I also graduated college in 2008. I borrowed $25k. It was paid back ten years later. $19k is not that much. A standard 10 year repayment plan of around $200-$250 a month should have fully paid that off. Your own fault you can’t manage your finances.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Behind paywall.

But if I can make an assumption based on the article title, it's someone complaining about life being unfair rather than acknowledging the mistakes of individual decisions.

I borrowed $19k for college.

I have paid back $24k.

I still owe almost $15k.

The only mistake I made was listening to every teacher over the years that drilled into my head that if you didn't go to college, you were a loser who would work at McDonalds for life. And of course, having the unfortunate timing of graduating college in 2008 when the whole god damn economy crashed.

Your comment is total out-of-touch Boomer energy. I wish a case of c.diff upon you.

I also graduated college in 2008. I borrowed $25k. It was paid back ten years later. $19k is not that much. A standard 10 year repayment plan of around $200-$250 a month should have fully paid that off. Your own fault you can’t manage your finances.

I don't owe anything for college but my BIL had a catastrophic accident in his 20s that resulted in missing a bunch of loan payments and totally ruined his finances for over a decade as a result. My sister has paid off his loans since but there's a reason they've managed to scrape together the money to pay for their daughter's college without making her take loans. Not everyone has enough of a financial cushion that $200-250/month is an expense they can maintain.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The complete narcissism and lack of self awareness is stunning. They just discovered that life is difficult and are carrying on as if they are the first.

That's not the point of the piece at all.

The point is that middle age looks different for people now but there is a presumption that it looks the same. There are longterm trends that are changing the course of people's lives. More people going o college but this is coupled with higher costs, lots of student loans, and the fact that many more jobs require college degrees than they used to. As more people have degrees, this has also pushed more people to pursue graduate degrees to remain competitive on the market, leading to more loans. All this education pushes back the age when people used to get married, buy homes, and have kids.

As a result, we have this mental picture of what middle age (or life at 35+) looks like, but it's based on a world that doesn't exist anymore. The essay is about that. It's not that it's harder or that no one else has ever dealt with stuff like debt before. It's that the course of life is different and the old paradigms don't apply. What does mid-life marriage look like when you didn't get married until 34, or if you are still renting while you both pay down student loans? If you both work? What does raising kids in mid-life look like if you don't have children until your mid-30s? And then what does retirement look like?

What is happening to a lot of millennials and even young Gen X is that as they are hitting 40 or so, they are realizing that the advice or model for this stage of life from their parents doesn't apply. Their lives are too different. I do actually think boomers went through this (I think older Gen X did not, actually, and that their lives really do resemble the family they grew up in to a far greater degree) because they were raised by people coming out of the Great Depression and the war.

But the mistake Boomers make is in thinking that the paradigms they created back in the 60s/70s/80s, which were a massive departure from the lives lived by their parents and grandparents, were permanent. They weren't. The world has changed again, we need new paradigms. But I think because Boomers are experiencing more longevity and better quality of life in old age than their parents did, and because of the way media can make nostalgia look like reality, it's been harder to make that shift. There is a refusal to accept the fact that things have changed.

That's what the essay is about. It's not about being surprised to discover life is hard.

These are choices. Why are millennials waiting so long to get married? It’s not expensive to go to a courthouse and marry. Millennial women want to have careers and do not want to be SAHMs like many boomers were (including POC women). Which is fine, but it means living in HCOL cities. Why are millennials obsessed with living in coastal urban areas? Why did millennials go to fancy expensive colleges?

People have always gravitated to large cities because that's where most jobs are.

Millennial women did not spontaneously decide to have careers. They were RAISED to have careers, they were groomed to believe that if they did not have careers and were not their spouse's equal financially, that they had failed. This is not some choice that millennial women made in spite of what culture or their families wanted them to do. This is what everyone told them to do -- their parents, teachers, media, etc. In 1970 a woman who decided to pursue a career instead of becoming a SAHM (if being a SAHM was an option available to her) was considered a weird outlier. By 2000, it was the SAHM who was considered the weird outlier.

Anyone who attended a fancy expensive college made that choice when they were still living in their parents' home. Which means that 9x out of 10, that decision was made WITH their parents, perhaps because of their parents. Lots of Boomers wanted their kids to go to fancy colleges to prove that THEY had made it. They raised kids to want a certain kind of education and to believe that education was the ticket to a good life.

The idea that an entire generation just decided to suddenly make choices that fly in the face of prior generations' goals for them is ludicrous. THESE ARE YOUR CHILDREN. They largely did what they were told and now they are the ones living with the consequences of of that, not you.

+1

[Anonymous]

“ As A Gen Xer, I am unsurprised that the millennial whining continues into middle age.”

+million. I can’t even read the drivel here.

-Gen Xer who lived frugally to pay off student loans before buying a home. Because that’s the non-whiny way.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm an older millennial or younger Generation X depending on how you divide them and haven't read the article. Also, I took out student loans for law school and have paid them off.

But I do think people now entering middle age with student loans got kind of screwed and it's one of the reasons I support loan forgiveness coupled with totally overhauling how we pay for higher ed, even though it won't benefit me personally.

It just seems crazy that we as a society decided it was okay for 18 year olds to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans with no underlying transferable asset (you can't sell someone your degree) and we think that's normal. I think my loans were different -- I took them out for a graduate degree with more value on the market, I was older when I took them out and I better understood what it would mean to repay them. But student loans for undergraduates, or for these schools with dicy cost-benefit promises (like community college or these for-profit colleges) just seems usurious to me.

I get why someone approaching 40 now who is still paying off those loans while also trying to buy a home and save for their own kids college would be really frustrated by that. People who let their kids take out loans like that without sitting them down and coming up with a plan for repayment first, were bad parents. It's just a really irresponsible thing to let a 17/18 yr old make that choice. It will haunt them for decades. And then schools and lenders profited off it -- the availability of student loans drove up the cost of higher education, and there are a bunch of very unethical businesses that have made a killing off servicing these loans and making it as hard as possible for people to pay them off or discharge them. It's really disturbing. I think people should be mad. They were taken advantage of.

That might explain the interest rate on these loans. They are an extremely risky proposition for banks since there are no assets.

On the other hand, they can't be discharged in bankruptcy and if they are federal they are guaranteed.

Banks are in a position to evaluate that risk and decide if it's worth it to lend. 17/18 year olds are not. It's a clearly imbalanced dynamic that benefits the bank and not the borrower. In most countries on earth, that type of lending would never be legal because it's so obviously designed to incite a young person to sign a contract that will keep them indebted for most of their adult life while enriching the bank, and only in the US do we look at that and think "this is fine!"

You make choices at all ages of young adulthood and old adulthood, I made a decision at 17 that I could not afford the student loan debt I would have to incur to attend a four year college and my parents made it clear (and I knew) they would never be in a position to help, and I don't fault them for this. Instead I worked and attended three years of community college and saved while living at home. Luckily I received some grants to help offset when I transferred to a four year college but I still paid as I went along and worked two, sometimes three pretty crappy jobs (with lots of all nighters) and I made it through, thereby affording me the opportunity late in life to sit at my computer and type with you lovely people in the middle of the day. Accountability has to come into play and it does not matter if you think you're entitled to go to college or to that car or that house, if you can't afford it, make an alternate plan. There are ways, some of them not great and not so fair, but that's life. I am so sick of the whining and bitterness from the millineall generation, GTFU and own your decisions.

Have you considered that some of the millennials who took out loans for college did so at their parents' behest? Because their parents wanted them to go to a certain kind of school and get a certain kind of degree, and the attitude was "this will all be worth it in the end?"

Your parents taught you that debt was dangerous and made it clear they couldn't help. A lot of millennials' parents said things to them like "eh, everyone finances everything these days, why not college" and "I'm sure you'll get a good job to pay for this but if you have a hard time, we'll help" and then renegged on that problem.

A lot of the complaining isn't really about being unhappy with their choices. They are unhappy with the way they were parented. Their parents convinced them that an expensive education from the fanciest possible college was the ticket to approval and success, their parents helped them finance it by cosigning all those loans, and then those people got older and realized they should have done what you did. But unlike you, they did not have practical parents who would have embraced a child who lived at home and attended community college as a cost-effective way to get an education. They would have been ashamed of it and made that known.

+1 to all of this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Even as a millennial, so much of this depends on exactly what you were up to during various points in time. I was in college during the dot com burst and things had reasonably recovered by the time I graduated. I was in grad school for the 2008 recession. I first bought a house in 2010 at the bottom of the housing market and have seen insane equity growth. I'm also an older millennial so college tuition hadn't risen nearly as much as it did for the younger segment of millennials, so my loans were reasonable after some significant merit scholarships.

By contrast, there are folks just a couple of years older than me who got pummeled with both job loss and loss of home equity in the 2008 recession. There are also folks a few years younger than me who graduated into the 2008 recession and never did find a job in there field, stunting then professionally. There's a big range.

This. I'm a "cusper" (born 1980) and I have a lot of empathy for many younger millennial who I think got kind of screwed. If you graduated college in 2007 or 2008, for instance, the job market was really rough, and you were too young to take advantage of lower housing costs and increased housing supply (unless your parents financed a house purchase, in which case no one feels sorry for you and it's not about your generation anyway). By the time you were making okay money and ready to start settling down, housing prices were skyrocketing. And your college was very expensive and your kids college will be outrageously expensive.

I really do think some people got very screwed by timing in ways that some people refuse to acknowledge. Everyone wants to act like they were just very prescient and smart but many of us just benefitted form good timing with the job and housing markets, and lucked into good timing with investments. If you can't acknowledge this about yourself, you're delusional.

Lots of publications about how graduating into recessions crimps LIFETIME earnings. Basically it hobbles you out the gate and you never really catch up. By the time the market is "good", you are old/pidgeon-holed/specialized into a lower paying but steadier career.

https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/recession-graduates-long-lasting-effects-unlucky-draw

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The complete narcissism and lack of self awareness is stunning. They just discovered that life is difficult and are carrying on as if they are the first.

That's not the point of the piece at all.

The point is that middle age looks different for people now but there is a presumption that it looks the same. There are longterm trends that are changing the course of people's lives. More people going o college but this is coupled with higher costs, lots of student loans, and the fact that many more jobs require college degrees than they used to. As more people have degrees, this has also pushed more people to pursue graduate degrees to remain competitive on the market, leading to more loans. All this education pushes back the age when people used to get married, buy homes, and have kids.

As a result, we have this mental picture of what middle age (or life at 35+) looks like, but it's based on a world that doesn't exist anymore. The essay is about that. It's not that it's harder or that no one else has ever dealt with stuff like debt before. It's that the course of life is different and the old paradigms don't apply. What does mid-life marriage look like when you didn't get married until 34, or if you are still renting while you both pay down student loans? If you both work? What does raising kids in mid-life look like if you don't have children until your mid-30s? And then what does retirement look like?

What is happening to a lot of millennials and even young Gen X is that as they are hitting 40 or so, they are realizing that the advice or model for this stage of life from their parents doesn't apply. Their lives are too different. I do actually think boomers went through this (I think older Gen X did not, actually, and that their lives really do resemble the family they grew up in to a far greater degree) because they were raised by people coming out of the Great Depression and the war.

But the mistake Boomers make is in thinking that the paradigms they created back in the 60s/70s/80s, which were a massive departure from the lives lived by their parents and grandparents, were permanent. They weren't. The world has changed again, we need new paradigms. But I think because Boomers are experiencing more longevity and better quality of life in old age than their parents did, and because of the way media can make nostalgia look like reality, it's been harder to make that shift. There is a refusal to accept the fact that things have changed.

That's what the essay is about. It's not about being surprised to discover life is hard.

These are choices. Why are millennials waiting so long to get married? It’s not expensive to go to a courthouse and marry. Millennial women want to have careers and do not want to be SAHMs like many boomers were (including POC women). Which is fine, but it means living in HCOL cities. Why are millennials obsessed with living in coastal urban areas? Why did millennials go to fancy expensive colleges?

Lots of GenX and Millenials were sold on the "student debt is GOOD debt" fallacy, and we were told to follow our passion and go to the best college we got into -- do what you love and money would follow.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Even as a millennial, so much of this depends on exactly what you were up to during various points in time. I was in college during the dot com burst and things had reasonably recovered by the time I graduated. I was in grad school for the 2008 recession. I first bought a house in 2010 at the bottom of the housing market and have seen insane equity growth. I'm also an older millennial so college tuition hadn't risen nearly as much as it did for the younger segment of millennials, so my loans were reasonable after some significant merit scholarships.

By contrast, there are folks just a couple of years older than me who got pummeled with both job loss and loss of home equity in the 2008 recession. There are also folks a few years younger than me who graduated into the 2008 recession and never did find a job in there field, stunting then professionally. There's a big range.

This. I'm a "cusper" (born 1980) and I have a lot of empathy for many younger millennial who I think got kind of screwed. If you graduated college in 2007 or 2008, for instance, the job market was really rough, and you were too young to take advantage of lower housing costs and increased housing supply (unless your parents financed a house purchase, in which case no one feels sorry for you and it's not about your generation anyway). By the time you were making okay money and ready to start settling down, housing prices were skyrocketing. And your college was very expensive and your kids college will be outrageously expensive.

I really do think some people got very screwed by timing in ways that some people refuse to acknowledge. Everyone wants to act like they were just very prescient and smart but many of us just benefitted form good timing with the job and housing markets, and lucked into good timing with investments. If you can't acknowledge this about yourself, you're delusional.

Lots of publications about how graduating into recessions crimps LIFETIME earnings. Basically it hobbles you out the gate and you never really catch up. By the time the market is "good", you are old/pidgeon-holed/specialized into a lower paying but steadier career.

https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/recession-graduates-long-lasting-effects-unlucky-draw

Double this if you’re African American. Literally still dealing with policies — Millennial.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm an older millennial or younger Generation X depending on how you divide them and haven't read the article. Also, I took out student loans for law school and have paid them off.

But I do think people now entering middle age with student loans got kind of screwed and it's one of the reasons I support loan forgiveness coupled with totally overhauling how we pay for higher ed, even though it won't benefit me personally.

It just seems crazy that we as a society decided it was okay for 18 year olds to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans with no underlying transferable asset (you can't sell someone your degree) and we think that's normal. I think my loans were different -- I took them out for a graduate degree with more value on the market, I was older when I took them out and I better understood what it would mean to repay them. But student loans for undergraduates, or for these schools with dicy cost-benefit promises (like community college or these for-profit colleges) just seems usurious to me.

I get why someone approaching 40 now who is still paying off those loans while also trying to buy a home and save for their own kids college would be really frustrated by that. People who let their kids take out loans like that without sitting them down and coming up with a plan for repayment first, were bad parents. It's just a really irresponsible thing to let a 17/18 yr old make that choice. It will haunt them for decades. And then schools and lenders profited off it -- the availability of student loans drove up the cost of higher education, and there are a bunch of very unethical businesses that have made a killing off servicing these loans and making it as hard as possible for people to pay them off or discharge them. It's really disturbing. I think people should be mad. They were taken advantage of.

That might explain the interest rate on these loans. They are an extremely risky proposition for banks since there are no assets.

On the other hand, they can't be discharged in bankruptcy and if they are federal they are guaranteed.

Banks are in a position to evaluate that risk and decide if it's worth it to lend. 17/18 year olds are not. It's a clearly imbalanced dynamic that benefits the bank and not the borrower. In most countries on earth, that type of lending would never be legal because it's so obviously designed to incite a young person to sign a contract that will keep them indebted for most of their adult life while enriching the bank, and only in the US do we look at that and think "this is fine!"

You make choices at all ages of young adulthood and old adulthood, I made a decision at 17 that I could not afford the student loan debt I would have to incur to attend a four year college and my parents made it clear (and I knew) they would never be in a position to help, and I don't fault them for this. Instead I worked and attended three years of community college and saved while living at home. Luckily I received some grants to help offset when I transferred to a four year college but I still paid as I went along and worked two, sometimes three pretty crappy jobs (with lots of all nighters) and I made it through, thereby affording me the opportunity late in life to sit at my computer and type with you lovely people in the middle of the day. Accountability has to come into play and it does not matter if you think you're entitled to go to college or to that car or that house, if you can't afford it, make an alternate plan. There are ways, some of them not great and not so fair, but that's life. I am so sick of the whining and bitterness from the millineall generation, GTFU and own your decisions.

I took some of our local community college courses while in high school; majority of students and teachers were checked out and maybe high now that I think about it.

Some community colleges are really strong (like NOVA is a great option), but vast majority are essentially degree mills for people to associates so they can work as the manager at Applebees. You won't actually learn much and thus be woefully unprepared if you manage to transfer to a four year University. The graduation rate for most community colleges is terrible. Only 20% transfer to a full time university, and then only 60% of that subset end up graduating -- so 12% of CC students end up with a bachelors.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/11/08/high-graduation-rates-community-college-transfers#:~:text=By&text=Only%20one%20in%20five%20community,National%20Student%20Clearinghouse%20Research%20Center.

Now if you sole need is have a bachelors, any bachelors, and you plan to go into a career without specific skills/knowledge, like sales, that's not a bad plan. But its hardly a panacea for the majority of students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm an older millennial or younger Generation X depending on how you divide them and haven't read the article. Also, I took out student loans for law school and have paid them off.

But I do think people now entering middle age with student loans got kind of screwed and it's one of the reasons I support loan forgiveness coupled with totally overhauling how we pay for higher ed, even though it won't benefit me personally.

It just seems crazy that we as a society decided it was okay for 18 year olds to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans with no underlying transferable asset (you can't sell someone your degree) and we think that's normal. I think my loans were different -- I took them out for a graduate degree with more value on the market, I was older when I took them out and I better understood what it would mean to repay them. But student loans for undergraduates, or for these schools with dicy cost-benefit promises (like community college or these for-profit colleges) just seems usurious to me.

I get why someone approaching 40 now who is still paying off those loans while also trying to buy a home and save for their own kids college would be really frustrated by that. People who let their kids take out loans like that without sitting them down and coming up with a plan for repayment first, were bad parents. It's just a really irresponsible thing to let a 17/18 yr old make that choice. It will haunt them for decades. And then schools and lenders profited off it -- the availability of student loans drove up the cost of higher education, and there are a bunch of very unethical businesses that have made a killing off servicing these loans and making it as hard as possible for people to pay them off or discharge them. It's really disturbing. I think people should be mad. They were taken advantage of.

That might explain the interest rate on these loans. They are an extremely risky proposition for banks since there are no assets.

On the other hand, they can't be discharged in bankruptcy and if they are federal they are guaranteed.

Banks are in a position to evaluate that risk and decide if it's worth it to lend. 17/18 year olds are not. It's a clearly imbalanced dynamic that benefits the bank and not the borrower. In most countries on earth, that type of lending would never be legal because it's so obviously designed to incite a young person to sign a contract that will keep them indebted for most of their adult life while enriching the bank, and only in the US do we look at that and think "this is fine!"

You make choices at all ages of young adulthood and old adulthood, I made a decision at 17 that I could not afford the student loan debt I would have to incur to attend a four year college and my parents made it clear (and I knew) they would never be in a position to help, and I don't fault them for this. Instead I worked and attended three years of community college and saved while living at home. Luckily I received some grants to help offset when I transferred to a four year college but I still paid as I went along and worked two, sometimes three pretty crappy jobs (with lots of all nighters) and I made it through, thereby affording me the opportunity late in life to sit at my computer and type with you lovely people in the middle of the day. Accountability has to come into play and it does not matter if you think you're entitled to go to college or to that car or that house, if you can't afford it, make an alternate plan. There are ways, some of them not great and not so fair, but that's life. I am so sick of the whining and bitterness from the millineall generation, GTFU and own your decisions.

Have you considered that some of the millennials who took out loans for college did so at their parents' behest? Because their parents wanted them to go to a certain kind of school and get a certain kind of degree, and the attitude was "this will all be worth it in the end?"

Your parents taught you that debt was dangerous and made it clear they couldn't help. A lot of millennials' parents said things to them like "eh, everyone finances everything these days, why not college" and "I'm sure you'll get a good job to pay for this but if you have a hard time, we'll help" and then renegged on that problem.

A lot of the complaining isn't really about being unhappy with their choices. They are unhappy with the way they were parented. Their parents convinced them that an expensive education from the fanciest possible college was the ticket to approval and success, their parents helped them finance it by cosigning all those loans, and then those people got older and realized they should have done what you did. But unlike you, they did not have practical parents who would have embraced a child who lived at home and attended community college as a cost-effective way to get an education. They would have been ashamed of it and made that known.

+1 to all of this.

YUP. I will never stop being grateful that my parents told me that students loans weren’t an option and that I’d be attending a state school that they could afford.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm an older millennial or younger Generation X depending on how you divide them and haven't read the article. Also, I took out student loans for law school and have paid them off.

But I do think people now entering middle age with student loans got kind of screwed and it's one of the reasons I support loan forgiveness coupled with totally overhauling how we pay for higher ed, even though it won't benefit me personally.

It just seems crazy that we as a society decided it was okay for 18 year olds to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans with no underlying transferable asset (you can't sell someone your degree) and we think that's normal. I think my loans were different -- I took them out for a graduate degree with more value on the market, I was older when I took them out and I better understood what it would mean to repay them. But student loans for undergraduates, or for these schools with dicy cost-benefit promises (like community college or these for-profit colleges) just seems usurious to me.

I get why someone approaching 40 now who is still paying off those loans while also trying to buy a home and save for their own kids college would be really frustrated by that. People who let their kids take out loans like that without sitting them down and coming up with a plan for repayment first, were bad parents. It's just a really irresponsible thing to let a 17/18 yr old make that choice. It will haunt them for decades. And then schools and lenders profited off it -- the availability of student loans drove up the cost of higher education, and there are a bunch of very unethical businesses that have made a killing off servicing these loans and making it as hard as possible for people to pay them off or discharge them. It's really disturbing. I think people should be mad. They were taken advantage of.

That might explain the interest rate on these loans. They are an extremely risky proposition for banks since there are no assets.

On the other hand, they can't be discharged in bankruptcy and if they are federal they are guaranteed.

Banks are in a position to evaluate that risk and decide if it's worth it to lend. 17/18 year olds are not. It's a clearly imbalanced dynamic that benefits the bank and not the borrower. In most countries on earth, that type of lending would never be legal because it's so obviously designed to incite a young person to sign a contract that will keep them indebted for most of their adult life while enriching the bank, and only in the US do we look at that and think "this is fine!"

You make choices at all ages of young adulthood and old adulthood, I made a decision at 17 that I could not afford the student loan debt I would have to incur to attend a four year college and my parents made it clear (and I knew) they would never be in a position to help, and I don't fault them for this. Instead I worked and attended three years of community college and saved while living at home. Luckily I received some grants to help offset when I transferred to a four year college but I still paid as I went along and worked two, sometimes three pretty crappy jobs (with lots of all nighters) and I made it through, thereby affording me the opportunity late in life to sit at my computer and type with you lovely people in the middle of the day. Accountability has to come into play and it does not matter if you think you're entitled to go to college or to that car or that house, if you can't afford it, make an alternate plan. There are ways, some of them not great and not so fair, but that's life. I am so sick of the whining and bitterness from the millineall generation, GTFU and own your decisions.

Have you considered that some of the millennials who took out loans for college did so at their parents' behest? Because their parents wanted them to go to a certain kind of school and get a certain kind of degree, and the attitude was "this will all be worth it in the end?"

Your parents taught you that debt was dangerous and made it clear they couldn't help. A lot of millennials' parents said things to them like "eh, everyone finances everything these days, why not college" and "I'm sure you'll get a good job to pay for this but if you have a hard time, we'll help" and then renegged on that problem.

A lot of the complaining isn't really about being unhappy with their choices. They are unhappy with the way they were parented. Their parents convinced them that an expensive education from the fanciest possible college was the ticket to approval and success, their parents helped them finance it by cosigning all those loans, and then those people got older and realized they should have done what you did. But unlike you, they did not have practical parents who would have embraced a child who lived at home and attended community college as a cost-effective way to get an education. They would have been ashamed of it and made that known.

+1 to all of this.

YUP. I will never stop being grateful that my parents told me that students loans weren’t an option and that I’d be attending a state school that they could afford.

Welcome to 2023. Google how much “affordable” instate public’s cost.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm an older millennial or younger Generation X depending on how you divide them and haven't read the article. Also, I took out student loans for law school and have paid them off.

But I do think people now entering middle age with student loans got kind of screwed and it's one of the reasons I support loan forgiveness coupled with totally overhauling how we pay for higher ed, even though it won't benefit me personally.

It just seems crazy that we as a society decided it was okay for 18 year olds to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans with no underlying transferable asset (you can't sell someone your degree) and we think that's normal. I think my loans were different -- I took them out for a graduate degree with more value on the market, I was older when I took them out and I better understood what it would mean to repay them. But student loans for undergraduates, or for these schools with dicy cost-benefit promises (like community college or these for-profit colleges) just seems usurious to me.

I get why someone approaching 40 now who is still paying off those loans while also trying to buy a home and save for their own kids college would be really frustrated by that. People who let their kids take out loans like that without sitting them down and coming up with a plan for repayment first, were bad parents. It's just a really irresponsible thing to let a 17/18 yr old make that choice. It will haunt them for decades. And then schools and lenders profited off it -- the availability of student loans drove up the cost of higher education, and there are a bunch of very unethical businesses that have made a killing off servicing these loans and making it as hard as possible for people to pay them off or discharge them. It's really disturbing. I think people should be mad. They were taken advantage of.

That might explain the interest rate on these loans. They are an extremely risky proposition for banks since there are no assets.

On the other hand, they can't be discharged in bankruptcy and if they are federal they are guaranteed.

Banks are in a position to evaluate that risk and decide if it's worth it to lend. 17/18 year olds are not. It's a clearly imbalanced dynamic that benefits the bank and not the borrower. In most countries on earth, that type of lending would never be legal because it's so obviously designed to incite a young person to sign a contract that will keep them indebted for most of their adult life while enriching the bank, and only in the US do we look at that and think "this is fine!"

You make choices at all ages of young adulthood and old adulthood, I made a decision at 17 that I could not afford the student loan debt I would have to incur to attend a four year college and my parents made it clear (and I knew) they would never be in a position to help, and I don't fault them for this. Instead I worked and attended three years of community college and saved while living at home. Luckily I received some grants to help offset when I transferred to a four year college but I still paid as I went along and worked two, sometimes three pretty crappy jobs (with lots of all nighters) and I made it through, thereby affording me the opportunity late in life to sit at my computer and type with you lovely people in the middle of the day. Accountability has to come into play and it does not matter if you think you're entitled to go to college or to that car or that house, if you can't afford it, make an alternate plan. There are ways, some of them not great and not so fair, but that's life. I am so sick of the whining and bitterness from the millineall generation, GTFU and own your decisions.

Have you considered that some of the millennials who took out loans for college did so at their parents' behest? Because their parents wanted them to go to a certain kind of school and get a certain kind of degree, and the attitude was "this will all be worth it in the end?"

Your parents taught you that debt was dangerous and made it clear they couldn't help. A lot of millennials' parents said things to them like "eh, everyone finances everything these days, why not college" and "I'm sure you'll get a good job to pay for this but if you have a hard time, we'll help" and then renegged on that problem.

A lot of the complaining isn't really about being unhappy with their choices. They are unhappy with the way they were parented. Their parents convinced them that an expensive education from the fanciest possible college was the ticket to approval and success, their parents helped them finance it by cosigning all those loans, and then those people got older and realized they should have done what you did. But unlike you, they did not have practical parents who would have embraced a child who lived at home and attended community college as a cost-effective way to get an education. They would have been ashamed of it and made that known.

+1 to all of this.

YUP. I will never stop being grateful that my parents told me that students loans weren’t an option and that I’d be attending a state school that they could afford.

Welcome to 2023. Google how much “affordable” instate public’s cost.

Yeah, four years of instate tuition is more than the current value of my parents house (they live in rural southern state).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm an older millennial or younger Generation X depending on how you divide them and haven't read the article. Also, I took out student loans for law school and have paid them off.

But I do think people now entering middle age with student loans got kind of screwed and it's one of the reasons I support loan forgiveness coupled with totally overhauling how we pay for higher ed, even though it won't benefit me personally.

It just seems crazy that we as a society decided it was okay for 18 year olds to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans with no underlying transferable asset (you can't sell someone your degree) and we think that's normal. I think my loans were different -- I took them out for a graduate degree with more value on the market, I was older when I took them out and I better understood what it would mean to repay them. But student loans for undergraduates, or for these schools with dicy cost-benefit promises (like community college or these for-profit colleges) just seems usurious to me.

I get why someone approaching 40 now who is still paying off those loans while also trying to buy a home and save for their own kids college would be really frustrated by that. People who let their kids take out loans like that without sitting them down and coming up with a plan for repayment first, were bad parents. It's just a really irresponsible thing to let a 17/18 yr old make that choice. It will haunt them for decades. And then schools and lenders profited off it -- the availability of student loans drove up the cost of higher education, and there are a bunch of very unethical businesses that have made a killing off servicing these loans and making it as hard as possible for people to pay them off or discharge them. It's really disturbing. I think people should be mad. They were taken advantage of.

That might explain the interest rate on these loans. They are an extremely risky proposition for banks since there are no assets.

On the other hand, they can't be discharged in bankruptcy and if they are federal they are guaranteed.

Banks are in a position to evaluate that risk and decide if it's worth it to lend. 17/18 year olds are not. It's a clearly imbalanced dynamic that benefits the bank and not the borrower. In most countries on earth, that type of lending would never be legal because it's so obviously designed to incite a young person to sign a contract that will keep them indebted for most of their adult life while enriching the bank, and only in the US do we look at that and think "this is fine!"

You make choices at all ages of young adulthood and old adulthood, I made a decision at 17 that I could not afford the student loan debt I would have to incur to attend a four year college and my parents made it clear (and I knew) they would never be in a position to help, and I don't fault them for this. Instead I worked and attended three years of community college and saved while living at home. Luckily I received some grants to help offset when I transferred to a four year college but I still paid as I went along and worked two, sometimes three pretty crappy jobs (with lots of all nighters) and I made it through, thereby affording me the opportunity late in life to sit at my computer and type with you lovely people in the middle of the day. Accountability has to come into play and it does not matter if you think you're entitled to go to college or to that car or that house, if you can't afford it, make an alternate plan. There are ways, some of them not great and not so fair, but that's life. I am so sick of the whining and bitterness from the millineall generation, GTFU and own your decisions.

Have you considered that some of the millennials who took out loans for college did so at their parents' behest? Because their parents wanted them to go to a certain kind of school and get a certain kind of degree, and the attitude was "this will all be worth it in the end?"

Your parents taught you that debt was dangerous and made it clear they couldn't help. A lot of millennials' parents said things to them like "eh, everyone finances everything these days, why not college" and "I'm sure you'll get a good job to pay for this but if you have a hard time, we'll help" and then renegged on that problem.

A lot of the complaining isn't really about being unhappy with their choices. They are unhappy with the way they were parented. Their parents convinced them that an expensive education from the fanciest possible college was the ticket to approval and success, their parents helped them finance it by cosigning all those loans, and then those people got older and realized they should have done what you did. But unlike you, they did not have practical parents who would have embraced a child who lived at home and attended community college as a cost-effective way to get an education. They would have been ashamed of it and made that known.

+1 to all of this.

YUP. I will never stop being grateful that my parents told me that students loans weren’t an option and that I’d be attending a state school that they could afford.

Welcome to 2023. Google how much “affordable” instate public’s cost.

Yeah, four years of instate tuition is more than the current value of my parents house (they live in rural southern state).

+1 unfortunately, even in-state publics are not affordable anymore. I attended an in-state public and still went into debt, albeit not by much. I will still encourage my child to do the same (but without the loans).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Even as a millennial, so much of this depends on exactly what you were up to during various points in time. I was in college during the dot com burst and things had reasonably recovered by the time I graduated. I was in grad school for the 2008 recession. I first bought a house in 2010 at the bottom of the housing market and have seen insane equity growth. I'm also an older millennial so college tuition hadn't risen nearly as much as it did for the younger segment of millennials, so my loans were reasonable after some significant merit scholarships.

By contrast, there are folks just a couple of years older than me who got pummeled with both job loss and loss of home equity in the 2008 recession. There are also folks a few years younger than me who graduated into the 2008 recession and never did find a job in there field, stunting then professionally. There's a big range.

This. I'm a "cusper" (born 1980) and I have a lot of empathy for many younger millennial who I think got kind of screwed. If you graduated college in 2007 or 2008, for instance, the job market was really rough, and you were too young to take advantage of lower housing costs and increased housing supply (unless your parents financed a house purchase, in which case no one feels sorry for you and it's not about your generation anyway). By the time you were making okay money and ready to start settling down, housing prices were skyrocketing. And your college was very expensive and your kids college will be outrageously expensive.

I really do think some people got very screwed by timing in ways that some people refuse to acknowledge. Everyone wants to act like they were just very prescient and smart but many of us just benefitted form good timing with the job and housing markets, and lucked into good timing with investments. If you can't acknowledge this about yourself, you're delusional.

Lots of publications about how graduating into recessions crimps LIFETIME earnings. Basically it hobbles you out the gate and you never really catch up. By the time the market is "good", you are old/pidgeon-holed/specialized into a lower paying but steadier career.

https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/recession-graduates-long-lasting-effects-unlucky-draw

Totally. I graduated into the recession with zero debt and still struggled - low starting salary, no raises, etc. Still, I clawed my way to higher income, job by job. But it took I was 35 to get my feet under me. I’ve now tripled my income in 5 years and am finally doing awesome at almost 40 but I’d still be so screwed had I had loans to start.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm an older millennial or younger Generation X depending on how you divide them and haven't read the article. Also, I took out student loans for law school and have paid them off.

But I do think people now entering middle age with student loans got kind of screwed and it's one of the reasons I support loan forgiveness coupled with totally overhauling how we pay for higher ed, even though it won't benefit me personally.

It just seems crazy that we as a society decided it was okay for 18 year olds to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans with no underlying transferable asset (you can't sell someone your degree) and we think that's normal. I think my loans were different -- I took them out for a graduate degree with more value on the market, I was older when I took them out and I better understood what it would mean to repay them. But student loans for undergraduates, or for these schools with dicy cost-benefit promises (like community college or these for-profit colleges) just seems usurious to me.

I get why someone approaching 40 now who is still paying off those loans while also trying to buy a home and save for their own kids college would be really frustrated by that. People who let their kids take out loans like that without sitting them down and coming up with a plan for repayment first, were bad parents. It's just a really irresponsible thing to let a 17/18 yr old make that choice. It will haunt them for decades. And then schools and lenders profited off it -- the availability of student loans drove up the cost of higher education, and there are a bunch of very unethical businesses that have made a killing off servicing these loans and making it as hard as possible for people to pay them off or discharge them. It's really disturbing. I think people should be mad. They were taken advantage of.

That might explain the interest rate on these loans. They are an extremely risky proposition for banks since there are no assets.

On the other hand, they can't be discharged in bankruptcy and if they are federal they are guaranteed.

Banks are in a position to evaluate that risk and decide if it's worth it to lend. 17/18 year olds are not. It's a clearly imbalanced dynamic that benefits the bank and not the borrower. In most countries on earth, that type of lending would never be legal because it's so obviously designed to incite a young person to sign a contract that will keep them indebted for most of their adult life while enriching the bank, and only in the US do we look at that and think "this is fine!"

You make choices at all ages of young adulthood and old adulthood, I made a decision at 17 that I could not afford the student loan debt I would have to incur to attend a four year college and my parents made it clear (and I knew) they would never be in a position to help, and I don't fault them for this. Instead I worked and attended three years of community college and saved while living at home. Luckily I received some grants to help offset when I transferred to a four year college but I still paid as I went along and worked two, sometimes three pretty crappy jobs (with lots of all nighters) and I made it through, thereby affording me the opportunity late in life to sit at my computer and type with you lovely people in the middle of the day. Accountability has to come into play and it does not matter if you think you're entitled to go to college or to that car or that house, if you can't afford it, make an alternate plan. There are ways, some of them not great and not so fair, but that's life. I am so sick of the whining and bitterness from the millineall generation, GTFU and own your decisions.

Have you considered that some of the millennials who took out loans for college did so at their parents' behest? Because their parents wanted them to go to a certain kind of school and get a certain kind of degree, and the attitude was "this will all be worth it in the end?"

Your parents taught you that debt was dangerous and made it clear they couldn't help. A lot of millennials' parents said things to them like "eh, everyone finances everything these days, why not college" and "I'm sure you'll get a good job to pay for this but if you have a hard time, we'll help" and then renegged on that problem.

A lot of the complaining isn't really about being unhappy with their choices. They are unhappy with the way they were parented. Their parents convinced them that an expensive education from the fanciest possible college was the ticket to approval and success, their parents helped them finance it by cosigning all those loans, and then those people got older and realized they should have done what you did. But unlike you, they did not have practical parents who would have embraced a child who lived at home and attended community college as a cost-effective way to get an education. They would have been ashamed of it and made that known.

+1 to all of this.

YUP. I will never stop being grateful that my parents told me that students loans weren’t an option and that I’d be attending a state school that they could afford.

Welcome to 2023. Google how much “affordable” instate public’s cost.

Yeah, four years of instate tuition is more than the current value of my parents house (they live in rural southern state).

In-state total COA for four years at multiple SEC schools (UF, UGA, Ole Miss, Alabama, South Carolina) hovers around $100k. Several of those states have scholarship programs for in-state students (e.g. Bright Futures, HOPE). This obviously is not affordable to everyone but is a world's difference from private schools and even state schools in other parts of the country.