Author: Aaron Weber

If I Default, Can They Repossess My Education?

Wherever you work, there are bound to be people taping or tacking cartoons to the walls. Sometimes they’re just funny stuff, but more often than not it’s something related to your job.

At my desk, I recently took down the Toothpaste for Dinner comic about applying autotune to your loans, and put up one by Emily Flake about what happens when the student loan people come to repo your BA.

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These comics are silly, but I like them, because they point out just how hard it is to really get your mind around a loan—especially when most of the money went straight to your school and you never actually touched it.

I mean, you might be able to recycle a 1980s bassline, but it’s pretty near impossible to turn a 1099-E into a hit R&B single. It’s not at all hard to understand that if you miss car payments the repo man will come and take the car. But what will lenders do about a student loan?

They Can’t Repo Your BA … Can They?

No. They can’t. But there are still some serious consequences if you don’t pay:

  • If it’s a couple days late, send the money and you’ll probably be fine.
  • After 30 days, you’ll be two payments behind, and probably owe a late fee as well.
  • At 60 days, your credit starts to take damage.
  • When you get toward a year late, you can enter default. At that point, things go south quick.

If You’re In Default

The consequences of default are way worse:

  • Your credit damage will be severe. You will find it harder to get a credit card, a lease, a car loan, maybe even a job. (After all, employers may not trust you with their money if they think you can’t handle your own.)
  • You’ll be charged collection costs, generally 18%–25% of the amount you owe.
  • You’ll be charged interest on those collection costs.
  • You’ll be charged interest on your late fees.
  • You’ll be charged interest on your unpaid interest.
  • You could face wage garnishment, i.e., a chunk of your paycheck taken for your loans before you even get paid.
  • Expecting a tax refund or Social Security check? Your loans can take that, too.

 

So, while they can’t take back the education, lenders will get their money one way or another.

If you do default, there are ways to recover, like rehabilitation and consolidation. But trust us, it’s way better to prevent default with a payment plan you can manage.

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Grad School

I think that what I really object to is the way everyone always elides the intractable disconnect between credentialing and education. I don’t want to go to grad school just to check a box, and I have a hard time seeing any actual advantage to spending 3-4 years grinding through a series of online lectures about IT supply chain management, aside from that shiny piece of parchment.

I feel like one of those gold bugs who refuses to comprehend that money doesn’t have to actually be a physical object of permanent value, and instead dives into conspiracy theories about how fractional-reserve banking and the Fed are systematic theft machines. I refuse to accept that cultural capital is actually just whatever we say it is. I really want a degree to have a real and relevant value, and not just be a way to keep out the rabble and network Our Sort of People.

Vocabulary: Spimes and… Something Else

So, according to Wikipedia, a spime is an object that can be tracked through its entire life cycle, through space and time, hence the portmanteau.

But I’m looking for a somewhat different word. A physical object which is, in fact, only the representation of a digital object. Say, if I have a document on Google Docs or Sharepoint or my hard drive, and print it out. I might scribble all over that sheet of paper, but the original is the digital version. And the changes I make to the paper version only become real if I make them in the digital version. The physical printout of the object is disposable; the digital original is the (more) permanent one.

I might make a piece of music on my laptop and then print it as an LP and take it to a house party and put it on a turntable. The LP is an instance of the original object.

For a dissection of the confusion this creates in a world that also demands a hardcopy for authenticity and archiving, see