Properly understanding intricate financial arrangements while also being able to see far into the future just to make sure you will get a well-paying job and never get sick or get laid off, and to make sure there won't be a banks-created global financial crisis, and wrapping your head around the default-interest-fees schedule that can have you owing 5x your loan 20 years later if something unexpected DOES happen - is difficult at best for someone with decades of adult life experience. Now you want 18 year olds to have that understanding and mystical future vision.

Yelling "personal responsibility!" while having been relatively lucky in life (if you're active on HN, you're one of the lucky few among your 8 billion peers) feels like ostrich syndrome to me.

Edit: I'm also a bit sad that you want the author or young people like him to accept that the social situation they're born in to dictates what level of education they can afford and pursue. To me that's akin to saying "well, your parents are poor and on welfare, so you should probably just accept that your high school in your poor neighborhood has decades old text books that need to be shared." It's not entirely analogous I suppose - you'd say something about personal responsibility again - but looking at the photo negative of your statement looks to me like "only rich kids can go to rich college, you have to accept your position in cheap college."

> Properly understanding intricate financial arrangements

I am borrowing 200k. I will need to pay back 200k plus interest, as documented in my paperwork. I am expected to have this all paid in X years.

What is intricate about that? Don't sign something if you don't understand it, ask questions, they're free.

It's also interesting to note that access to even "financial sense" for the poor, doesn't exist.

But history, grammar, chemistry, physics and all those other subjects "are", according to most school curriculae. Arguably, those subjects are really not that necessary for most of the population to function in day-to-day situations, and yet we drill and drill it into students incessantly.

Financial sense, however, is very important for the majority of the population. Even more so for those not-so-fortunate to win the oh-so-often-complained-about "genetic" or "parental lottery".

The inner conspiracy theorist in me would have me convinced that not-teaching such important topics is the only way to keep the economy-engine churning. Efficiency and money-sense in the general populace are not things that will drive "growth" and "GDP". But I could be wrong.

> What ever happened to personal responsibility and learning some financial sense?

Does this not also apply to the banks making the loans? In other words, a bank that is willing to lend me much more than what I can honestly afford is either negligent or rapacious, but not responsible or sensible. The bank is not properly valuing the risk that I represent. If they were, I would have been denied such an oversized loan.

I have mixed feelings on this. If I lend somebody money without any reasonable due diligence on my prospects to be repaid, it is true that the borrower still owes me, but it's the height of entitlement for me to go complain to the government that I need special treatment under the law (bankruptcy...) because I made a poor lending decision.