On the one hand, the education system is seriously broken. Setting it up so that teenagers routinely get into tens of thousands of dollars of debt in order to accomplish something that is basically a requirement for participating in the modern economy is broken. We should be investing heavily in high-quality and affordable public education, not propping up expensive private schools with government debt. And the fact that they are tax-exempt is absurd. Look at the real estate development practices at Harvard, Columbia, and University of Chicago and explain to me exactly how these are not profit-driven corporations.

And frankly, I think the mid- to low-range private liberal arts school is almost as scammy as a for-profit college (almost). People who get into a lot of debt at top-tier schools can at least parlay that into well-paying jobs. A degree from Rando Jesuit Liberal Arts College of the Midwest with an 85% Admissions Rate will not give you much of a competitive advantage, and yet they cost nearly as much as the Ivy League.

So I don’t find what this person is doing is WRONG, per se. It’s explicitly allowed by the conditions of IBR. It just seems like a stressful and tenuous life path that could easily be upended by life or policy changes. I suppose I like creature comforts too much to live like this. The government has extraordinary debt collection authorities above and beyond any other kind of creditor; it can garnish your wages if you ever screw up on IBR and go into collections, and you can’t discharge student debt in bankruptcy. I wish you well, sir, but…not for me. I have a friend with six figures of debt from an MFA in performance art with the same life plan and I worry for her.

People can choose to work 60 hour weeks and work their butts off to pay off their loans, or they can work at poverty wages part-time and do IBR. I don’t really see how one is morally superior (from a financial perspective—we can debate which contributes more to society, but the number of hours you work or how much money you make does not inherently show that you contribute more); businesses default on loans all the time as a matter of course. We are all cogs in a broken machine, so maybe we should focus on fixing that rather than sniping each other’s choices we make to get by.

(full disclosure: I did totally make a snarky comment on the original post that I still sort of stand by, but it was more related to his “emergency planning” than student debt repayment strategy)