Amanda Lynn Tully, pictured above and one of the subjects of a New York Times article (gift link!) about people so troubled by the legal and ethical requirement of living up to their student loan agreement that they move out of the country to avoid paying up. More than 40 million borrowers have federal student debt to pay back, and 7.7 million have defaulted on their loans, according to recent data from the Education Department. Anecdotal evidence and conversations on Reddit and other social media indicate that some borrowers, like the dislikable young woman pictured above, think moving to another country is a dandy way to solve their problems.
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Ethics Alarms 
People like this don’t deserve a shred of sympathy. They should bar entry back into the USA for people like this unless they completely pay off their school loans and all the accumulated interest. I’d seriously consider revoking their United States citizenship and voiding their passports, make them ficks without a country.
Steve,
It’s hard for me to find sympathy, either. As Jack noted, she’s donned a set of headphones that are quite expensive. She probably uses a phone that cost her upwards of $1000. It appears she’s invested some money in two-tone hair and decent threads.
My point is this: people will always have money for the toys they want. I’m not sorry that a student loan makes a person sad, or feel bad, or somehow holds them back from furthering his/her commitment to total me-ism. I’ll wager that if someone in Prague borrowed money from Ms. Tully with a promise to pay it back, then fled to the United States, she would probably care more it than the lender to whom she’s denied repayment and skipped town.
“My point is this: people will always have money for the toys they want.”
Put another way: People Don’t Seek What They Need, They Seek What They Want
A corollary: When someone really wants something, and they will move heaven and earth to get it.
PWS
At a minimum, they should deny passport renewal for anyone delinquent on their student loans. That alone will cause her significant trouble after 10 years.
Student loans should be full recourse which means the government can go back to the educational institution that received the money for repayment. That will teach the institution a lesson in financial management. Let the institution decide whether it wishes to collect the remaining debt.
Full recourse loans are a type of loan small auto dealers use to finance their cars. In the event of default the dealer must repay the bank and be left to repossess the vehicle at its own risk and expense. I doubt many colleges will be financing basket weaving degrees if that were the case.
The situation is a little more complicated than that.
The problem: college is expensive.
Government comes in to “fix” the “problem.”
Government creates a loan program to help students and pats itself on the back for doing something.
The next problem: colleges get all this free money (and spend it) causing students to max out the loans.
Government comes in to “fix” the “problem.” Government authorizes bigger loans (and the cycle continues).
The next problem: banks would never lend on such risky prospects.
Government comes in to “fix” the “problem.” Make the loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.
So, the banks are protected; the colleges are protected; the Government saved the day.
The student are fucked.
(Mind you, I paid off my loans. That should be the expectation. At the same time, I do have some sympathy with students who are struggling to repay the debt because the system is not set up to help them; it pretends to be, but it allows the colleges and lenders to take advantage of the system, all to the detriment of the students.)
So, how does Government come in to “fix” the “problem”? Cancel all student loan debt. A stupid idea that, thankfully, did not succeed.
-Jut
College may be expensive, but it isn’t the education part. Looking at budgets, I would guesstimate that 2/3 of the cost of college is funding athletics, student activities, and excess administration. In addition, ‘recreational expenses’ (bar tab) can easily add up to 25-50% of the college bill.
So in order to attack this student loan debt problem you need to find a solution where colleges have some skin in the game. Having student loans be full recourse could be part of that solution. Capping student loans may also be considered.
The current system creates a moral hazard for colleges to continue raising tuition at higher than inflationary levels, and spend it on real estate and sports teams, but not on the quality of education and research.
In other post it was noted that although the costs of tuition has skyrocketed, the quality of education has gone down, and hiring of graduates has decreased. In other words, higher cost for less value. Colleges need a market signal with strong financial incentives that this is no longer sustainable.
While filling taxes, realized I’m months away from being done with my student loans. Just in time for my children to begin theirs.
Total loan balance was close to Amanda’s. The field, however, was in demand, and that led to many expensive for-profit private schools to dominate. Many of those schools which remained solvent to the present have been absorbed by class actions alleging predatory lending.
It’s interesting looking back on the “college affordability crisis” of the 90’s and the following “healthcare affordability crisis”. The graphs of their costs before and after government intervention make me question why anyone trusts government at all.
I had loans that exceeded hers but I paid some off before finishing school. Then, I consolidated some after law school at a pretty good rate. And, I put myself on a 30-year payment plan. Paid it down aggressively. Had kids; stopped making payments for a while because my next due date was years out. Finally paid them all off after about 20 years.
Getting a degree that gave me marketable skills certainly helped.
The one loan I regret was a $14,000.00 loan in grad school. I did not “need” the money, but the loan was there and it did make life a little easier.
-Jut
There will always be folks who don’t pay back loans, but with an improved financial education in our formative years, as well as a realistic look at life instead of a promise of an easy existence following our dream, many people would not have the college debt, nor would there be a repayment crisis. Heck, with more financial education, perhaps our personal debt crisis in this country could start to fade, and when the people are more fiscally responsible, they might possibly hold the government to a higher standard too. Deficit spending is as harmful to the person as it is to the government, though the thresholds for financial collapse are a lot lower for the person. The college loan program, in my opinion, is caused by many of the same factors as the overwhelming government debt.
I am a millenial, the first real generation to think that the college loans were not to be repaid in a significant way. I do not hold to this view, first, having not taken out any student loans because I went to the state school on a full ride scholarship, and took grading, lab and research assistantships to pay for my graduate work and what my scholarship didn’t cover. But second, my husband, who also got major scholarships and an assistantship for a while, ended up taking out $18,000 for his doctorate. We paid it off as quickly as we could with our jobs.
The attitude for why many of my generation felt that student loan repayments were unfair can be explained by a discussion I had with a friend. She told me that she felt we were sold a lie. Teachers, councilors, and generally society said loudly and proudly to everyone was that it didn’t matter what degree you got, but if you got a college degree, you’d succeed, and do so quickly. I remember hearing this as well, but my dad, seeing me think about my future, sat me down with an assignment to make a cost of education verses payment for the job you’d get with that degree chart. I also had to compare that with some basic costs of living. I didn’t come to the exact conclusion he wanted (pharmacy school) but my chemical engineering degree had the approximate same effect.
My friend, however, never had that financial talk with her folks who also believed that she should follow her passion and the effect of her college degree would be a well-paying job upon graduation, which was the well-publicized path to success for everyone in my generation. Like many of my peers in college, she chose to get a degree in something she enjoyed, in her case, anthropology. Now, to be fair, she chose a school that charged around $2K a semester for instate tuition, rather than $25-50K a semester like some folks. However, I would like to emphasize that so much of what we were taught was that we would not have to delay gratification, because the instant we graduated, we’d get a fantastic job that’d make us rich immediately. No one mentioned that we’d have to start at a lower salary and work hard to get raises and promotions. That reality was denied as we were promised a college degree would deliver our private utopia directly upon graduation. When everyone tells you the same story, you believe that story.
There was also the economic downturn that occurred right as we were graduating from college, which meant that jobs in many fields were lacking. This complicated the process, because now that we were out of college, those loan payments were coming due, but there were very few jobs available, and only the best and brightest were getting them. This was not an issue for me, with a graduate assistantship, but for her and many others, it was devastating. She responded, like many of my peers, with going for a second degree. However, her choice this time was only slightly better, with a degree in biology. However, I recall others in my circles that went on for graduate degrees with high costs in fields like Women’s studies, Religious studies, and more. After all, we were still being told by the people who we thought we could trust, that the answer was simply more education, and more debt.
When my husband was taking out his loans, it was incredibly easy to take out money and not think about repayment. The financial aid office made the loans easy to get, suggested taking out as much as possible instead of only what you needed, and repayment was barely discussed, with many of the details in fine print. Very little, if any effort was put into making sure that young adults understood the consequences of their choices. This targets the same age range of people who do not have the right to drink alcohol because we believe that they are too young to fully understand the consequences of their actions with this beverage. Heck, many people sign onto college loans before their 18th birthday, for their freshman year, so they aren’t legal to do many things.
My friend, as well as many others, continued to pile on the debt, trying to follow the advice they were getting from popular sources, the colleges themselves, and their parents. They came to the conclusion that since they didn’t get the promised dream life, they should not have to pay the price of college because they were scammed by the system.
While I doubt this would solve all the problems, it is important that since we have education about the cost/benefit analysis of college. Most school guidance councilors, the people we should be trusting, are telling kids to go into astronomical levels of debt for stupid reasons, and families are believing it, especially those in less educated households. We need to stop saying that college degrees are the one way to make a large amount of money, instead of also discussing the trades.
Also, instead of insidiously promising an easy life, we need to explain that adults have to work long, hard hours to have the nice things that we find in established houses. Something that we need to understand, and need to teach our kids is that yes, you are going to have to do stuff you don’t want to do if you want to be financially set. You will need to work overtime for no pay. You will need to do extra work than what your job description says. You will need to be on call 24-7. You will need to miss birthdays, Christmases, and other important events. This is how our parents lived. This is how we live. This is how you will have to live. Or, you can get an easy job, make very little money, and budget hard. Somehow, we have a society that thinks that it is easy to have money and leisure time, when those are usually not correlated. Nice things take time. We have to scrimp and save, just like our parents and grandparents did. Telling our kids that they can have all the luxuries without putting in years and decades of effort is just setting ourselves up for people like Amanda. I don’t necessarily think she’s a sociopath so much as the product of overblown promises and raised on the idea of happiness as a right, not a goal.
We need to explain how, when you borrow money, you have to pay it back, so make sure that you make intelligent decisions about borrowing money (something that the vast majority of America seems to struggle with, both in personal and governmental policies). Teaching people real fiscal responsibility is something that families should teach, but as so few families have that ability, perhaps it should be covered in school, as a required “other” subject in high school. Heck, even a project in other classes would be good. If schools have time to teach people how to protest and what to do with gender dysphoria, they have time to teach basic budgeting and loan repayment.
I also like the idea that Chris Marshner has of schools being on the hook for the loans. When schools are on the hook for these tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, they have incentive to counsel their students in fiscal caution, rather than profligate spending. They also might decide to lower administrative burden, stop giving professors insane raises (my University rotates people out as department head every few years, and if you are department head, you get a serious raise that you keep even when you aren’t head, so if you get rotated in twice, you get a second raise), spend less money on building projects that are unnecessary, and focus on keeping costs down while providing a good education and improving job placement services.
As usual, Sarah, a guest post in a comment.
Graduating with a BA in English in 1973, I knew full well that other than teaching high school or grade school, I was not qualified for any particularly remunerative job. When I tired of low paying teaching jobs, I went to law school and became a lawyer and spent twenty years doing something I didn’t like. But it put a roof over our heads and paid for our kids’ private school (less expensive than childcare) and college. Mrs. OB worked in IT.
This is an excellent comment. Sarah’s comment, along with what Chris suggests, would go a long way to fixing the problem. Holding schools accountable for the defaults on student loans would limit money/loans given on unprofitable degrees – women’s studies, African-American studies, gender ideology studies, peacemaking studies, etc.
I went to college and law school on student loans but only borrowed enough to cover the tuition/books costs. I worked full time and paid my expenses from what I earned. I paid the loan off – it took years but they are paid in full. Yeah, it was a pain in the neck but that is what I signed up for and what I did.
jvb
I don’t know what reality Sarah B lives in, but I want to be in it. My wife got her LPN about 10 years into our marriage. Her first year as an LPN (a 1-year degree), she made more than I did as a tenured professor with 15 years of experience. The universities around here are having a hard time holding onto faculty because the high schools are paying more. So, I don’t know where this ‘crazy salaries for faculty’ comes from. It took me 10 years to break $50,000/year. However, I work in the private sector. If you are part of the ruling class and work for the government, then you have all that government waste to feast on (see DOGE’s work).
Now yes, there is blame for the universities. The bait-and-switch routine of ‘You need to get a college degree to get a good job’ when you apply followed by the ‘We aren’t here to prepare you for a career, we are here to make you an educated person’ that the humanities have always had is an issue. That isn’t true for all areas, however. Many are very focused on preparing their graduates for a career.
A lot of this has to do with our modern leadership and the demands of students. We have too many colleges. Because of this, schools need to fight for students to survive. If you don’t offer what students want, your school goes bankrupt (unless it is subsidized by the taxpayers). Why do schools offer so many ‘worthless’ degrees? They do it because that is what students demand. They want college to be easy, not difficult. Engineering isn’t easy, it is demanding. There is a set curriculum, there are things you must know and must be able to do if you are going to be an engineer. Name me 1 thing a History B.A. graduate is required to know. There isn’t anything. They just have to know…stuff. When that happens, it is ok if not all the ‘stuff’ doesn’t get covered. Then it is less…and less…and less. So these degrees become much easier than the ones that have fixed curricula. Students don’t want to work hard and many of them only want the prestige of ‘A college degree’ or ‘A master’s degree’.
Years ago, I worked at a university on the brink of bankruptcy. Student enrollment was falling despite the fact that we were one of the cheapest schools in the state and were close to the top in academic rankings. We just couldn’t get students. We hired some consultants who interviewed prospective students and students who didn’t come and came to some conclusions. The takeaway message was that we were too cheap and too hard. They had several suggestions.
(1) Get rid of our old-style gym and get a shiny new ‘wellness center’. Raise tuition to pay for it. We did and we got more students
(2) Build suite-style living and apartments for the students. They didn’t like dorms. Raise tuition to pay for it. We did and more students came.
(3) Students wanted to be college athletes. So, we started a lot more sports teams and raised tuition to pay for it. More students came.
(4) Students wanted more entertainment at night and on weekends. So, we hired entertainment staff to schedule events on nights and weekends to entertain them. We raised tuition to pay for it and more students came.
All these ‘improvements’ roughly doubled the cost of the ‘education’. Students complained about the cost of the education, but they didn’t come when it was cheaper.
Academic standards can’t be the same if you have to allow the students to go to entertainment events in the evening and 1/3 of your students are athletes who travel to games. When academic standards were tightened, students fled to other schools who were easier. On the faculty side, tenure is mostly dead. Professors are treated as commodities and if they don’t give the students what they want, they are gone. The school will just hire some high school teachers as adjuncts at 1/ 4 the cost. Student evaluations are reviewed every semester for ‘student satisfaction’. Retention is the name of the game. Fail students and you will soon be out the door too.
So yes, college is too expensive. It is focused on too many things that aren’t academic. The majority of degrees don’t prepare students for careers. However, it is the students who chose all of these things. Universities can’t force you to complete a worthwhile major. They can’t force you to live in cheaper housing. They can’t force you to spend your time on your studies instead of night life and sports. If they try, they go out of business and there is someone else to give the students what they want. There are very few colleges left that are rigorous and cheap. They have been driven out of business except for the elite few (that are also taxpayer supported).
There is also seems to be this focus on ‘a master’s degree’, especially among women. There is a proliferation of these non-thesis master’s degrees in the humanities and grievance studies in the last decade. I see women touting that they are ‘educated’ because they have ‘a master’s degree’ and they don’t even know what the field of their master’s is. The schools love this because there is no limit on the amount of student loans for a master’s degree, like there is for a bachelor’s. Because of this 10x as many women as men have student loans over $70,000.
So why were the students allowed to create the current university system? I believe it is because of a lack of leadership and the rise of the managerial class. Over the last 60 years, the role of faculty in guiding the universities has diminished in favor of the managers. Instead of faculty being promoted to department heads, department heads promoted to deans, deans promoted to provost, and provosts promoted to presidents, we now hire even department heads from outside the university. Under the old system, the administration was composed of former colleagues of the faculty and mostly supported the faculty. The new administration is staffed with strangers who are new to the school and have no association with the now ‘teaching staff’. These administrators are hired and fired based on financial numbers and the financial numbers are wholly dependent on ‘current student satisfaction’. These managers hire and fire faculty based on the financials and you have few faculty left who value ‘rigor’ or ‘academic preparation’.
So, that is the current situation. We have modern leadership and students to thank/blame for it.
We will see if this posts and I am truly un-banned.
There’s this passage from the article:
Besides the emails, debt plays virtually no role in Mr. Zúñiga’s [another expat debtor discussed in the article] life in Shanghai. Ms. Tully and Mr. Cooper [yet another expat debtor] also lead seemingly debt-free lives. They largely rely on local jobs and freelance work, still living comfortably despite earning far less than their American peers. Both have visited the United States without encountering issues and said they rarely thought about their debt.
I wondered what they were doing for a living in their foreign countries. I like the way they visit the U.S. without encountering any problems. Nice.