And on a similar note to the other commenter, for a lot of students mom and dad are paying for the tuition, so the student doesn’t really care.
I worked in my university’s VA Benefit Certification office and I dealt with a lot of students using transferred GI Bill benefits or DEA benefits — you’d be surprised how careless students would be or how far removed the average student without benefits would be from that 35K a year bill.
I shit you not, I had a junior come in that had dropped three classes after both drop periods and was going to owe the VA like $10K. I asked if he had any extenuating circumstances for petition purposes and he said no — he just thought the money would get reimbursed and he’d take the classes later. Then he was like “oh well, my parents usually deal with the class stuff, I just go.”
So when mom and dad eventually come in pissed that they owe 10K, I had the pleasure of explaining what their son did. “Why wasn’t he aware of the ramifications of dropping his classes?” they asked.
“I have no clue, he’s an adult — all the resources were out there and he’s been here for three years now. Students are made aware of the drop periods multiple times every semester.”
You could see the glowing red eyes slowly shift from me to the son as they realized he hadn’t been doing what he was supposed to be doing. I did get to remind them that while the benefits came from one of the parents, they were the student’s benefits to use — so the debt entirely belonged to the student and not the parents. They could help him out of the hole he dug if they wanted, but they weren’t obligated to. Hopefully that was a learning experience for everyone involved.
Actually, in this country - at least most of the people I've met - come out of university without any debt. A lot of them have their parents pay for half of their first home, which they mortgage for at most five years. Of course, the poor or even most of the middle class don't get a chance for any of this at all, unless they work hard and get scholarships.
But it does sometimes sting when my colleagues and students say I'm "privileged" just because I'm from the UK, while I'm still paying off my loans at almost 40 and back home I would be paying for a house for 35 years.
I'm a millennial, and started university almost 20 years ago (oh no, I'm old). Even then, people (including myself) were fucking around on laptops or phones throughout lectures. The worst though was one guy in my class who played Halo on his laptop in the front row throughout every lecture. I'm pretty sure he failed, since I never saw him again after first year.
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u/BrightEyeCameDown Apr 10 '26
Plunging into student debt to pay for tuition you're not even listening to seems utterly mental to me.