http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/why-i-defaulted-on-my-student-loans.html?_r=0
Interesting read. On one hand, I sympathize. On the other hand, defaulting on your student loans should not be a source of pride. I don’t see any indication that he tried to find a workable payment plan. He sounds arrogant and entitled, imo.
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.
Lee Siegel is an award-winning critic and an unrepentant leech. After pursuing not one, not two, but three degrees from an Ivy League university, he chose to default on his student loans at taxpayer expense, because he felt that paying them back would have hampered his ambitions of becoming a writer.
Though his piece never mentions his alma mater by name, his official speaker’s bio states that he eventually went on to earn a B.A., M.A., and masters of philosophy from Columbia University.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/06/08/lee_siegel_new_york_times_op_ed_is_this_the_worst_op_ed_ever_written_about.html
Wow! Thanks for adding this link! What an a-hole.
dadx
June 9, 2015, 11:39pm
4
It’s not his finest hour (one hopes).
I do think his comment that “millions of young people …may want to consider my example” is a classic, unintended double entendre.
A good response:
http://www.redstate.com/2015/06/08/the-burden-of-doing-whats-right/
But here is the part Lee Siegel misses. I started making $45,000.00 a year out of law school. But my income has gone up ever since. My student loans payments have become less and less of a burden. And when they were a true burden, I was easily able to stop paying for a time or work to reduce my payment. Sure, I’ll be paying on them longer now, but I was able to get to a point where I could pay them more easily.
Certainly I had to make some decisions I wish I did not have to make. Certainly there are things I could not do because money had to go to pay back student loans. But I entered into the obligation.
The best things in life are not free. That includes education. Lee Siegel could have met his obligations. He could do so now. He did not chose life. He chose, essentially, to steal and now to brag about it. Not only that, he chose Columbia. He could have gone somewhere else as millions of other American do because of cost.
Thankfully, my parents taught me better than that. If you have an obligation, you honor it. Bragging about being a proud deadbeat is a sign of bad character. Lee Siegel noted that his mother is deceased. Were she alive, she’d be stuck with his student loan debt as his co-signer. But she’d probably be more upset seeing her son bragging in the New York Times about being a deadbeat.
There is already a thread in the financial aid and scholarships section.
atomom
June 10, 2015, 12:17am
7
He says his vocation is writing? He might consider this, from HD Thoreau: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
He might find some more interesting things to write about if he would just get a job, any job.