Originally Posted by
MoarAlpha
There is no way being an airline pilot would count as a public service.
The income based repaymwnt is fine, but if you know anythig at all about interest rates or compounding interest they are going to get their money wvwntually. Don't come *****ing when you have very high payments near the end of your payment cycles to make up for the lower payment initally.
Just pay off your damn loans like a responsible individual. Don't go saying you cant afford it because all the regionals pay about the same and you knew you would have to go that for some time.
You are correct, it doesn't apply to private service, only public (firefighter).
But 99% of the pilots out there did NOT know or think they'd be flying for regionals for 10 years and I'd be the majority of them had no idea they'd be earning 20K/yr when they started. You say "do your research", but it's only relatively recently that we've had internet and the ability to look some of these things up, and even then it's not really the "experience" that leads us to question the decision, especially when everyone else around us is telling it's "cyclical" and "you're getting on at a great time, when it's about to turn around!". I've seen plenty of people on this site ripping apart some columnist that has published an article saying that airline pilots make an average of $120,000/yr, but that article is read by young impressionable minds that see=$$$. How does such a person know to separate the truth from the lies? Which ones are just small lies? Which ones are bending the truth? Which ones are blatantly not true? Most of us have experience to look back on to know this. Most people starting out do not.
I think there's some general lack of understanding of human nature and the reality of educational loans. On the one hand, you're saying that people should be fundamentally "good" and pay back their loans, but on the other hand we have the evidence that they are not and are not to some extent. So which is it? If we just yell louder to "pay back your loans" that's going to magically generate the revenue? How is that going to stop it from happening again?