Lee Siegel: The "I Can Have It All (And I Deserve It All And Shouldn't Have To Pay For It)" Syndrome
Lee Siegel -- in the news some years back for sockpuppetry -- writes with pride in The New York Times about defaulting on his 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.
Some people will maintain that a bankrupt father, an impecunious background and impractical dreams are just the luck of the draw. Someone with character would have paid off those loans and let the chips fall where they may. 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.
Les's answer? Free money for college for everyone (free, as in, other people pay for children who are not theirs).
Instead of guaranteeing loans, the government would have to guarantee a college education.
Oh, and why is college now so expensive? Because government has vastly upped the price with their student loan guarantees.
I didn't have student loans, but I also wasn't allowed (by my parents, who paid for college) to go to a "small, private liberal arts college." (No, the world is not your oyster and the sooner you realize there are limitations -- and find creative ways around them instead of whining about them -- the better.)
They told me I could go, at the in-state price, to the University of Michigan. I did that for three years. When I wanted to go to NYU, which I did (and graduated from) for my final year, I wrote my way to a scholarship. My parents paid what it would have cost for me to go to Michigan, and I paid the rest by working after class at a jingle house a few days a week and working all weekend making copies for graphic designers at a place called The Stat Store.
Siegel has what I see as an absurd sense of entitlement vis a vis his desire to go to the perfect school and have others pay for it.
By the way, I wanted to go to graduate school for film, which my parents found hilarious. Due to their thinking that way, I did what countless now-professional filmmakers have done. No, not enter USC's grad film school, but make films and videos and work my ass off as a production assistant for Robert Altman and others (including making sure nobody parked on 67th Street in the middle of the night as my big job on "Hannah and Her Sisters."
I used a video I made when I was at NYU to get a job at an ad agency with the best production department in New York, Ogilvy & Mather, so I could learn and get paid. After I left full-time employment at Ogilvy (because my goal was never to be in advertising), I made short films for them, produced commercials for Mad Dogs and Englishmen (some adorable O&M expats), and made three short films for Comedy Central. And then, giving free advice on the street corner kind of took off, and I became an advice columnist.
But I was a writer not because I went to writing school but because I wrote. And then when you write and you get edited, you learn, and you write more and you suck less.
The notion that you must take the formal path is just bullshit.
I'm reminded of when Rick Barrs and Jack Cheevers needed to hire a new film critic after Pulitzer winner Peter Rainer went to New York Magazine. They put out the word and Rick got 700-some letters. They ended up choosing Gregory Weinkauf, who was then working as a near-slave at a talent agency, who had zero experience writing film criticism, but was a great writer and thinker. His first year in, he won an LA Press Club Award for his work.
The bottom line: You don't need to go to writing school to become a writer. You need to write your ass off and maybe take a couple of classes with teachers like Samantha Dunn. What's that cost? A few hundred dollars? You can earn that in a couple of weekend working at a photocopy store like I did.
If he was pushing for this in a political way instead of whining about it I'd be more appreciative of his opinion.
(Hate never-ending foreign aid esp. disaster aid (going to dictators) - prefer to spend $$ here)
Bob in Texas at June 8, 2015 3:26 AM
"At the end of 2014 the enrollment count for SNAP was approximately 12,000 individuals. Now that individuals have to complete either 20 hours of part-time work a week, volunteer for at least 24 hours per month, or get involved in a vocational program, the amount of SNAP recipients has dramatically dropped from 12,000 to approximately 2,500 by the end of March — a nearly 80% reduction in welfare."
Volunteering 24 hours per month to receive aid is not worth the welfare for most. Just show me the money please and go away.
(hate the bigoted hatred (in my opinion) shown in the headline but hears the source link)
http://toprightnews.com/maine-just-put-welfare-leeches-in-their-place-every-american-needs-to-see-what-happened-next/
Bob in Texas at June 8, 2015 3:36 AM
State school? The horror!
(Proud graduate of UT Austin.)
Astra at June 8, 2015 5:25 AM
Guess boya doesn't realize that the whole system collapses, if everyone does what he did...
Which is why they make it painful.
Character? It's obvious, the character he has. He has also foreclosed a number of employers, and network ops... when they read this, they'll know he expects the world for free.
Course, the places that he intends to work at will be fine with it, they are just as cutthroat as he.
We'll see how he feels, when he is old.
swissarmyd at June 8, 2015 7:32 AM
Fuck Lee Siegel.
It strikes me as absurd? It strikes me as criminal that you don't see the need to pay back debts which YOU incurred, jackass. Yet here we have people agreeing with your pomposity and thinking perhaps uncle sugar should pay your way. That's MY tax money, sweetheart. You want some, you come and do my yard work.
DrCos at June 8, 2015 7:40 AM
I am not completely without sympathy. Millennials are being sold a bill of goods with regard to the value of a college education, and particularly a liberal arts education. That said... one reason they keep falling for tales of Santa Claus is because they soooooo want to believe that a Santa Claus exists and that they are his favorites.
And, I came from a broken home and economic circumstances that were probably similar to his. And I certainly did not think of myself as too good for a state school. And I didn't make the mistake of thinking that a "crip" degree, as we used to call it (meaning one where the classes aren't very hard, you get to hang out with the kewl kidz, and you have time to do a lot of partying) was going to make me rich. And, I worked my way through; I was a co-op student and I also had a job with the university. I did take out one small loan, which I paid off decades ago.
Now: what Siegel writes about is going to happen large scale. The Millennials will repudiate those debts; I don't know if it will happen through legislation or as a mass act of civil disobedience, but it will happen. And as I said, I'm not without sympathy, even though it will cause a large-scale economic crisis. I can support calls to do it as a way of putting right a moral wrong, committed by the schools and the Boomer culture. However, I cannot support calls that come from a sense of entitlement, as Siegel's does.
Cousin Dave at June 8, 2015 7:47 AM
I think debtors' prison got a bad rap, put Mr. Siegel in there for a while. Have him do highway-weed-whacking by hand, or long stretches making small rocks out of big rocks. Might help him pave that road to the "character" he wasn't born with.
bkmale at June 8, 2015 7:52 AM
To me the tuition problem and student debt problem would be easily solved by simply requiring the Universities (not gov't or banks) give the loans.
It would create a self correcting system, if the degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on, the students can't get jobs, and cant pay back loans, to the ones who sold them the worthless degrees. If the student defaults, the University denies that they have completed a degree when asked by employers.
Joe J at June 8, 2015 8:21 AM
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
Is the problem that he borrowed money to attend a mall private college because he deserved better than a state school? Yeah, I'd say that's the problem. Not the borrowing, the inflated sense of entitlement.
Conan the Grammarian at June 8, 2015 9:14 AM
I've been hearing so much talk about student loan forgiveness the last few years. The only instance I've seen in which a student loan should be wiped away by the bank was some woman who posted a photo with a sign in which she wrote something like she had taken out a $25,000 loan and had paid back $46,000 due to interest rates. She still had quite a ways to go toward paying it off. In that case, yes, the remainder of her loan should be forgiven because the bank's already made its money. I would support this for anyone who has already paid back more than the worth of their original loan.
Fayd at June 8, 2015 9:16 AM
Won't work. The schools will use diversity and social justice as the basis for awarding the loans, won't change the curriculum to actually educate the students, and will then petition the government for reimbursement when the not-ready-for-prime-time graduates cannot repay the loans.
Conan the Grammarian at June 8, 2015 9:18 AM
So, the rest of us who paid off our loans in total with interest should get a refund?
Who are you to say how much money the bank is allowed to make? The bank loaned her the money and, as a result, forewent all opportunities to make more money by loaning that principal as a building loan, a car loan, a credit card, etc.
She agreed to pay the interest rate and, by law, it was disclosed to her in the application process how much the total repayment would be. Balking at paying it later is not fairness, it's dishonesty.
And the Federal government guaranteed that loan, meaning we the taxpayers are on the hook for however much she and her fellow students fail to repay.
Conan the Grammarian at June 8, 2015 9:51 AM
"Who are you to say how much money the bank is allowed to make?" - Conan the Grammarian
I'm just a person expressing my opinion. I don't agree with the movement to have all student loans forgiven. However, I feel that it's justified when somebody's paid an amount equal to the loan plus an additional 84%. So yes, Conan, if the total you paid to the bank came out to double the amount of the original loan, I would say you're due a refund. But good luck getting it.
Fayd at June 8, 2015 2:37 PM
Then, Fayd, don't sign on the dotted line.
As for the original column, I'm still trying to swallow the part where he dropped out of state school because he thought he "deserved better." I still haven't been able to swallow it, instead it is sticking in my throat like a giant hairball, making me gurf.
What about those of us who graduated from state schools? Perish the thought, indeed! We're just a bunch of losers who lowered our expectations because we lacked healthy self-esteem?
This little shit's just a welcher, and that's all.
Pirate Jo at June 8, 2015 2:44 PM
DrCos: "You want some, you come and do my yard work."
Ha! That's exactly what I did from about 6th grade until I went to college - yard work, cutting lawns, trimming hedges, raking leaves - anyone who would hire me and pay me. I even painted a couple of houses when in high school. Worked at a factory one summer and in the grocery store another. Anything to save up for college.
I learned to save that money for college and then worked while in college as well - not much; but 20 hours a week while a fulltime student isn't all that easy.
But, that is what *I* did to pay for college.
Yes, it helped that I got some financial aid (grants not loans). And those were based upon my grades from high school which were *earned* as well as my own money.
And, now some of these folks want me to pay for their birth control, their food stamps, their health insurance, and now their higher education!?
One day, and it might be very soon, my money well is going to run dry.
charles at June 8, 2015 5:16 PM
I have ex-family that signed for a student loan for my ex and they in all likelihood used at least some of the money for their own general purposes because they never asked him to pay it back. That loan, taken out 20 years ago, has a balance right now that is larger than the original balance to start with. It has survived at least one bankruptcy. If the loan cannot die and cannot expire (at least taxes can only be pursued for 10 years), then at MINIMUM during circumstances where you are financially insolvable, the loan should not accrue penalty/interest. You're gonna get your money back, but it matters not to the lender how long it takes, because they are banking on the penalty/interest. Like banks and their NSF fees. They kinda really want you to be an airhead.
gooseegg at June 8, 2015 9:53 PM
Now, Slate has gotten their two cents in on Mr. Siegel.
DrCos at June 9, 2015 4:20 AM
"What about those of us who graduated from state schools? Perish the thought, indeed! We're just a bunch of losers who lowered our expectations because we lacked healthy self-esteem?"
Yeah, not only that, but some of us actually went in for busines or STEM degrees! How uncool can you get?
Cousin Dave at June 9, 2015 6:54 AM
America!!! What a country.
Used to be only the spoiled rich kids developed a major sense of smug self-righteous condescending entitlement.
Kate O'Brien at June 9, 2015 5:32 PM
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