By Matt Underwood 
you commented about how nobody forces us into debt, and we all made a choice to take on our debt.
I want to help you, and anyone else browsing this thread who thinks that way, understand why that line of thinking is both wrong and unhelpful.
With the obvious disclaimer that my situation doesn’t apply to 100% of student loan borrowers, I’m willing to bet that what I’m about to describe is an extremely common thread among the majority of us, especially those of us who are a little older and who started college in the early 2000s when things were just getting worse.
I spent my entire adolescence and teenage years listening to every single adult in my life telling me constantly that the only way I’d ever get a “real” job was to go to college. My parents, my grandparents, my friends’ parents, aunts and uncles, teachers, school counselors, TV, movies, the old guy bagging groceries, literally everyone.
By the time I graduated high school in 2000, it had been ingrained in me to the point I was legitimately scared that I might choose a major that I wouldn’t do well at, and if I failed out of school I’d end up homeless.
You know what nobody talked to me about, ever? Compounding interest. How over the course of your college career, you’re not adding debt onto a single loan that accrues interest, you taking out multiple loans, each with their own compounding interest, and with their own separate payment requirements which leads to not only massively ballooned debt, but also ballooning monthly payments. School financial advisors who gave bad information. How the tax and bankruptcy laws had literally just been changed to make sure that I’d never escape from this debt no matter what my life situation may end up being. How student loan programs were being overhauled that very year to become more predatory.
Not one single person ever sat down and explained to me just how life-altering the debt would become, or how I would never be rid of it because the interest would amount to more than double (I’m some people’s cases, more than quadruple) what I originally borrowed, and even bankruptcy – which I’ve been through – wouldn’t erase it.
No, I didn’t “make a choice” to go deep into forever-debt. I was conditioned into it by people who, however well they meant, didn’t prepare me for any of it.
Please bear in mind that, especially where student loans are concerned, the majority of people taking them are literally children. Teenagers, experiencing the “real world” for the very first time, with no experience to judge by, no real understanding of what they’re getting into, and have probably been conditioned just as I had.
On top of that, especially in the last couple decades, the very idea of college has become extremely predatory. From schools that continually jack up tuition rates because of the ease with which their students can obtain loans, to advisors who are bad at their jobs, to even the military which has intrinsically tied education benefits to service (that’s how they got me), everything about college is made to put students at a disadvantage, financially, and to encourage the use of predatory programs that will not only ensure students begin their adult lives under a mountain of inescapable debt, but to ensure that they are literally enslaved to one system or another because of it.
It’s extremely easy to sit back as an adult and judge the choices of children, especially if you never went to college yourself and didn’t experience all this. It’s far more difficult, but far more helpful, to try to be part of a solution.
You know what really fucked me up regarding your student debt crisis?
Here in my country we have a pretty old common-law rule (in Duplum) that says the interest on a debt can never exceed the principal amount. So if you take a loan of say 50, your obligations will cap out at 100. The interest just stops running.
It’s just so obvious and sensible I presumed this would apply in most common-law countries (with similar legal jurisdictions to ours). Then I started to see screengrabs from American students – some of whom have repaid their principal obligations two or three times over – and are still in debt for more than twice the principle amount.
This was unfathomable to me. More than your at-will “labour laws”, more than binding medical cover to your employment, this single concept (or lack thereof) made me understand just how financially precarious it is to be an American.
I’ve heard debt analogised as slavery before, but such a system really can only tend to strip your people of all upward mobility. How can your middle class ever grow? Many nation’s struggles and failures (including my own) can be correctly explained by failures in implementation, resources and enforcement. But this system surely leads to failure by design?
If this is the American dream, the world is wise to reject it.