When defaulting on student loans is okay … as long as you are happy

You simply must read this full op-Ed from the New York Times. Why I Defaulted on My Student Loans

I found it incredible and amazingly reflective of the attitudes that prevail today.    I find this to be a self-serving load of crap. Accumulating debt for both under and graduate school was not essential. Graduate work could have been done after acquiring a job, even going to school part-time as millions of Americans have done. He could have worked part-time in addition to his writing quest. Instead of walking away he could have paid what he could after being established as a writer or dreamer or whatever his life was to be.

Here are some excerpts, but promise you will read the original. If you do, you will see his solution to loans is simply more taxes. Yes, there are problems with our higher education system and we should put pressure on schools for change, but to glorify the attitudes expressed in this article is representative of a decline in our collective integrity and a slap in the face to all Americans who have and continue to meet their financial obligations. It’s all about me, what I want and the way I want it and then finding somebody else to pay for it under the guise of being fair.

According to Wikipedia:

He received his bachelor of arts degree from the Columbia University School of General Studies and his master’s degree and M.Phil. from the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, taking student loans co-signed by his mother. Since then, he has defaulted on his student loans, and is proud of it.

Aren’t you glad you paid for his college?  He does a good job attracting attention with his point of view which no doubt is great for his career. I wonder if he would apply the same, not my fault, logic to walking away from a home mortgage because the value dropped or he bought something he could never afford in the first place … like going to Columbia?

Years later, I found myself confronted with a choice that too many people have had to and will have to face. I could give up what had become my vocation (in my case, being a writer) and take a job that I didn’t want in order to repay the huge debt I had accumulated in college and graduate school. Or I could take what I had been led to believe was both the morally and legally reprehensible step of defaulting on my student loans, which was the only way I could survive without wasting my life in a job that had nothing to do with my particular usefulness to society.

I chose life. That is to say, I defaulted on my student loans.

As difficult as it has been, I’ve never looked back. The millions of young people today, who collectively owe over $1 trillion in loans, may want to consider my example.

It struck me as absurd that one could amass crippling debt as a result, not of drug addiction or reckless borrowing and spending, but of going to college. Having opened a new life to me beyond my modest origins, the education system was now going to call in its chits and prevent me from pursuing that new life, simply because I had the misfortune of coming from modest origins.

Am I a deadbeat? In the eyes of the law I am. Indifferent to the claim that repaying student loans is the road to character? Yes. Blind to the reality of countless numbers of people struggling to repay their debts, no matter their circumstances, many worse than mine? My heart goes out to them. To my mind, they have learned to live with a social arrangement that is legal, but not moral.

Maybe the problem was that I had reached beyond my lower-middle-class origins and taken out loans to attend a small private college to begin with. Maybe I should have stayed at a store called The Wild Pair, where I once had a nice stable job selling shoes after dropping out of the state college because I thought I deserved better, and naïvely tried to turn myself into a professional reader and writer on my own, without a college degree. I’d probably be district manager by now.

Or maybe, after going back to school, I should have gone into finance, or some other lucrative career. Self-disgust and lifelong unhappiness, destroying a precious young life — all this is a small price to pay for meeting your student loan obligations.

But I have found, after some decades on this earth, that the road to character is often paved with family money and family connections, not to mention 14 percent effective tax rates on seven-figure incomes.

Moneyed stumbles never seem to have much consequence. Tax fraud, insider trading, almost criminal nepotism — these won’t knock you off the straight and narrow. But if you’re poor and miss a child-support payment, or if you’re middle class and default on your student loans, then God help you.

Mr Siegel, the road to character is actually paved with hard work, sacrifice, commitment and personal responsibility. Not taking the easy way out because you don’t like the system thereby making it worse for everyone else.