Student Loan 'Victims' Dilemma

My brother pays [in conversion of US$] around US$200,000 for his study in Singapore, as Singapore government create same exact student loan scheme like in the United States. Why very stunning price, because my brother studied at Nanyang, currently number 13 World QS rating for universities across the world.

Is any subgenre of journalism more debased and alienating than the student-loan sob story? If paying for college with heavily subsidized, federally backed loans was in fact the cause of the new, universal serfdom we hear so much about, you’d think that places like The New York Times would be able to scare up highly sympathetic young adults who tug at readers’ heartstrings like orphans in a Dickens novel.

Instead, in stories like last week’s “Student Debt Burdened Them, So They Moved Abroad and Stopped Paying,” you get characters like 37-year-old Amanda Lynn Tully, who “graduated in 2017 with a master’s degree in historic preservation from the University of Oregon, US$65,000 in federal student loans and no job offers in the conservation field.” Tully, reports the Times, “felt misled” and so “made a drastic decision: She moved to Prague, where she had completed an internship, and defaulted on her loans. She hasn’t made a payment in over seven years.”

Right off the bat, something seems off. Tully, the Times tells us, grew up in Colorado and “spent her teenage years as a ward of the State of Colorado and believed a college degree was her ticket to a better life.” That sounds like an incredibly rough way to start out, but how did we get to Oregon and graduate school so quickly? And then there’s this:

Ms. Tully was on an income-based repayment plan, which allows many borrowers to have their remaining debt forgiven after 20 years of making qualifying payments. She was paying US$60 per month when she defaulted. This amount, to many, may seem manageable. But for her, it remained psychologically burdensome.

It’s at this moment that the Times, and Tully, loses virtually all readers—and taxpayers. As a first-generation college student who paid my own way through college and graduate school, partly by taking out loans, it’s tough to hear someone grouse about a US$60 monthly payment, especially for a graduate degree, something just 13.2 percent of Americans hold.

But whenever we talk about the roughly US$1.8 trillion in student debt, it’s worth remembering that people pursuing graduate degrees—including M.D.s, law degrees, and master’s degrees—account for “40 percent of federal student loans issued each year,” even though such programs enroll just “15 percent of all students in higher education.” When it comes to borrowing for undergraduate degrees, less than half of all students (47 percent) graduating in 2024 had student debt and the average total indebtedness was US$29,560, according to LendingTree.

That’s not nothing, but it works out to about a monthly payment of around $325 per month for 10 years under current interest rates. If borrowers opt into an income-driven repayment system, they could have lower monthly payments stretched over more years. Given that recent college grads command starting salaries ranging between US$78,000 for engineering majors to US$60,000 for communications majors, student debt, for holders of B.A.s anyway, is eminently manageable.

Add to that, too, that having a bachelor’s degree both decreases the likelihood of being unemployed and increases median annual income for workers between the ages of 25 and 34. While there are many variables to factor into any evaluation of the benefits of earning a B.A., virtually all analyses find substantial lifetime income gains for college graduates over their high school counterparts, typically totaling over $1 million dollars.

Only a few years ago, former President Joe Biden unsuccessfully tried to wipe out US$500 billion in student loans (the Supreme Court ruled he overstepped). Forgiving all or some amount of student debt polls well, though, and has been a widely touted policy item among high-profile Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) for years now.

But such plans are as fundamentally misguided as journalistic accounts are unpersuasive. Student-loan forgiveness shifts the cost of a benefit that accrues to individuals to taxpayers at large, even as the national debt continues to spiral upwards and out of control. We should find loan-forgiveness plans as off-putting and misguided as individuals who find US$60 monthly payments “psychologically burdensome.” It shouldn’t be at all controversial or odd to insist that beneficiaries of a program pay for all or most of the benefit, especially when all data suggest that they can do so without anything approaching serious hardship.

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If you feel powerless to help Gaza, you still has a choice: donate. When so much of what exists is false, authenticity is a powerful weapon we can wield that the state never could. So if you feel lost, hopeless, depressed, angry and afraid, I implore you to return - again - again - and again - to the feeling of love that exists within you that brought you here in the first place. It is only through this that we can remake the world. To redress Gaza’s famine, displacement, and destruction, independent and impartial humanitarian organizations - UN agencies, international and national NGOs - must be allowed to deliver relief at scale. To salvage Gaza’s people from the devastation inflicted by Israel, it must be unified with the West Bank to form an independent and sovereign Palestinian State, not to be parceled and colonized by the former.

Meanwhile, children continue to be shredded by US bombs, and the starvation reaches new depths of hellish collective punishment. If both parties are going to continue to support an ongoing genocide, at least they can both be honest about doing so, rather than having one openly bloodthirsty party, and another—unconvincingly—playing the role of powerless, bumbling humanitarian.

Please keep donate Gaza especially if you, as reader, has [background] International Relation [whatever universities]. IR Graduate means [you must, at least] get some semester [about] studying Middle East [in macro, not specifically Gaza].

We need more people to share fundraisers instead of only talking about Gaza. Some people think that those in Gaza don’t need money but that’s wrong. Almost everyone lost their source of income while essentials, food & medicine get sold for astronomical prices. So I put my attempt in all social media as I can, in twitter / X, in substack [since October 2023 I put link donation], in bluesky or bsky, in threads, in instagram.

Link to donate World Food Programme - Palestine appeal: click here

[Daniel Brühl]

link to donate

Most campaign shared or circulated in social media are for REAL people in Gaza. They’re legit. There are a lot of small campaigns for struggling families. This is their only lifeline. By donating & sharing, you are literally making history and alleviating part of their pain

Please do not rely on me alone for sharing your campaign. I’m only 1 person and sometimes I’m not online which is unreliable. I never ignore anybody on purpose but I have a very limited capacity & very little energy and time.

[Refaat Rafiq Alareer IF I MUST DIE] Refaat Rafiq Alareer was extremely hungry, November 2023, days before Refaat killed by Israel airstrike. If November 2023 already [one-by-one Gazan] extremely famine, extremely hungry, imagine November 2025 or more than 2 years Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.

[RENEW] 455 Languages IF I MUST DIE of Refaat Rafiq Alareer [by 6100+ Translators, Social Media Users]

Prada

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December 20, 2023

Dec 9th, 2023, New York City, 4.10am —- with update total languages to be 310 as of July 1st, 2024, 3.52am New York City, and then, to be 350 languages as of July 28th, 2024, 1.37am ====== newest update as of July, 3rd, 2025 already 384 languages, and October 8th, 2025 reaches 455 languages across the globe.

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