This is a weird take to read when you're someone who dropped out of college when the debt load got too scary and had learned enough to gain a marketable skill and enter industry. Paid my debt off in a couple years. This was less than a decade ago, too, I'm not that old.

Tuition has been frozen at my university since I left so the kids there now have the same exact choices I had

The big difference between me and my peers was that I did poorly academically my first year and it forced me to enter the work force and learn the value of the money I was borrowing, and after that I borrowed the minimum I could to remain in school, for the minimum time, as it was so expensive.

I'm supposed to believe that it's impossible to avoid... When I avoided it?

I even got screwed by federal assistance because my parents seemed financially healthier than they were. I paid for 90% of my own educational costs, by working part time. And like I said this was the late 00s, early 10s, I'm not telling a tale from the 70s

My wife has a similar story, but started out much poorer. Now we're both professionals sans degrees making over six figures, no debt. But that's impossible.

I get it, these are anecdotes. But student loan debt is a choice, and it's one we both avoided, so it's definitely possible to do.

> I'm supposed to believe that it's impossible to avoid... When I avoided it?

Being possible isn't the same as being scalable, for the vast majority of people debt is extremely difficult to get out of, and it's in the interest of the creditors (quite literally) to encourage lending to people who are likely to find it difficult to break free of the compounding interest, because it maximises their return.

Even assuming everyone was individually instantly capable of recognise and managing the risks of their debt, there would be massive reduced opportunity for ways to escape it, and the interest might be higher in order to satisfy the creditors who would otherwise not get as much return... it would be much harder to escape in that situation - From that perspective you should count yourself lucky, had everyone been as "smart" you might still be in debt.

Congrats, you're the exception that proves the rule.

I know a lot of people who were, frankly, railroaded into college. Middle class kids who never had to worry about money, did good to excellent in school, never worked a serious job, were told by their schools, parents, teachers, television and the internet that any degree was a path to success. Then the clock strikes midnight on their 18th birthday and they have no idea how to make informed decisions, so they just do what they've been told by everyone they've trusted for their entire lives.

They mostly ended up with history, sociology or some other useless undergraduate degrees and working at Starbucks if they're lucky and five to six figures of student loan debt with no way to pay it off. And by the time they're wise enough to actually handle money responsibly they're already trapped.

Also most universities are not freezing tuition, and I'm wondering where you went to college and what your part time job was, and how much assistance you got. You're not paying college tuition by working the counter at California Pizza Kitchen part-time. Plus Tuition has continued to inflate every year even since the early tens, although the rate of inflation has decreased in recent years. https://www.in2013dollars.com/College-tuition-and-fees/price...

Nonsense. Student loans are not some kind of enforced slavery or whatever. You are getting a education, you are investing in human capital and that will increase your earnings potential for the rest of your life. Just like every other investment.

You are like gone be working for 40 years, to spend some of that paying back university is not a horrible deal. People here act like you get absolutely nothing for student loans as if you were born a debt slave.

One can make an argument of course that another system is better, a system where everybody (including people who don't go to university) pay more taxes and you pay more taxes in order to pay for higher education. That argument can be made.

There are many improvements that could be made, less people should do formal education and more people should be doing apprenticeships and then part time further education. That would produce much less debt without actually fundamentally changing the system.

However to act like this is some draconian feudalism is crazy.

no, it's simply the reality that there's quite a bit of range from the the constant late-stage-capitalism crowd's doomsday worldview to the libertarian/alt-right/whatever crowd's "snowflakes just want to have 30 genders and don't want to work" narrative.

yes, things could be better. (yes, a lot better if people suddenly were suprarational.) yes, there are metrics that regressed in the US, or even in the world in general (civil liberties for example)

but it's quite possible to look at each issue in context, and this approach is a lot healthier and more useful than adopting either extreme. (student debt is basically the perfect issue for this, because without context we can just throw anecdotes or useless overly general statements at each other. there's not even consensus about what's the problem. yes, tuition costs are high, and rising. yes, many people have trouble servicing their debt. and so on. but these are different - though of course interconnected - problems. nor is there consensus about who is most affected. should society instead focus on those who did not even have the opportunity to apply to collage? should we focus on those who dropped out due to financial hardship yet ended up with debt? both? neither? and so on.)