Kurt, I agree. I worked during my four years of undergraduate studies (mainly summers and one term as a Geology student assistant/researcher).
The same for graduate school (parents helped when I was out of work).
Paid for my AA in Police Science. Got two loans for my Paralegal School/Certification (and have been working in that skill for about 30 years).
No outsider gave me a free ride nor did I ever expect them to do so. Family helped but I carried the bulk of the repayments on my own (plus being married and having children).
Now some student loan recipients can do a few things that would cut down their lack of cash for repaying their loans, including STOP SMOKING. At about $5.00 a pack minimum, you could save anywhere from $5.00 - $30.00 a week.
The same for Starbuck coffee and lattes. 7-11 reportedly has very good coffee or buy a can for yourself. Tea is cheaper and better, JFYI.
Stop eating out 3 times a day. Make your own breakfast - cereal, toast, eggs and bacon, etc. OJ, Milk. pack a good sandwich and bring Ice Tea from home. Soda machines are getting more expensive. If not, buy a 6 pack or more. Cuts the costs of a soda/ice tea, etc in half.
Stay off of expensive internet sites and services. They cost too damned much in the first place for crap and more crap.
Share rides/costs when necessary.
Iron your own shirts, guys. I was one of only two guys on my dorm floor in colleague who knew how to iron shirts. Saved me a fortune in cleaner costs.
Don’t own a car if you have decent transportation where you live. A big cost that you don’t realize until you need gas, repairs, taxes, licenses, insurance, etc. There will be time later to have that. Or get a jalopy for puttering around campus or to work/home. Thieves don’t usually steal a crappy looking bland car. Keeps your insurance rates down.
Parse out your time for classes, studying, work, and some entertainment. A good balance takes a lot of strain off of you. Exercise is good too, even if it is only walking.
Marry a rich person! In your dreams.
Using common sense is probably the best approach to handling your college finances. If you family has a financial advisor, talk to them. See if your college has one you can talk to.
And lastly, don’t get some halfassed degree in Genderbender/LGBTXYZBLT and Sanskrit. There aren’t many jobs out there in those fields.
My daughter got a paralegal degree on her own, plus other legal training. My son got a degree in “Fighting for Freedom” in Iraq. He has the VA loans program if he wants to go back to school (he’s learning a whole new trade on the job after having served as a policeman. He’s got good technical skills and wants to keep learning. His employer is paying for it). They are not slackers or borrowers unless they have too.
Try some of the above. You’ll like it when it pays off is less worry, debt, and stupid choices.
9. Guns and ammo
10. Guns and ammo
11. Guns and ammo
12. Guns and ammo
13. Guns and ammo
14. Guns and ammo
15. Guns and ammo
16. Guns and ammo
17. Guns and ammo
18. Guns and ammo
19. Guns and ammo
20. Guns and ammo
etc., etc., etc.
Only one correction:
No lose loss to society there.
Regards,
I paid for my education. I paid for my wife’s education. I paid for my children’s education.
I’m not going to pay for some dead beat liberals education just because they don’t want to.
They borrowed the money and they need to pay it back.
Responsibility is a word that the left does not know the meaning of.
At that time in university fees were reasonable. Today tuition costs are insane. They are insane because of much largess via loans given to students. The universities then inflate the costs of tuition because they know the students can get loans to cover their insane fees. The few that graduate in science, engineering and medicine are left with much debt but can repay it. Those that graduate in liberal courses obtain a degree but without much viable skills and a huge debt that they probably can not repay.
The real problem is to much government guaranteed loans to students. This is what drives the insane increases in tuition.
The Bernies and others who want a “free higher education system” should implement the system in Germany:
1. Shut down 75% to 90% of American colleges
2. End all useless courses - I don’t see any “gender studies” in German universities
3. Close dorms, wasted money on sports teams, millions spent on coaches etc. - you’re there to learn, nothing else
4. Make the entry purely competitive and no sports, quotas etc. - if this means the colleges are then 50% asian and 20% Jewish, so be it.
5. Improve apprenticeships etc - plumber shops across the USA are crying for apprentices for jobs starting at $60K pa
This will end the arms race for degrees. The money saved can be used for so much more
I dare to observe that this is a sign of a breaking point that can never be spanned by continuing to think in worldly terms. A world that can think no better things than snark (and it matters naught whether the snark comes from left or right) is a world that, absent repentance towards God (talk about an unmeetable debt!) will spend eternity living with Satan. Oh the right in such an ungodly split may have better finances — all the better to buy its way to hell! The left will merely be penurious hypocrites — the crowd that Jesus was sneered at for paying friendly visits to.
I took 18 hours of courses a semester and went to summer school.
I also did it without any student loans. I worked three jobs and poured all on my money into school tuition and living expenses.
I was always broke and hungry. Starving student. No car. Walked or rode an old bike. Shopped at the thrift store for used clothes. I didn't waste money on beer, cigarettes or socializing.
All I did was study and work. Slept very little, 3-4 hours a night usually. I did exercise and became a long-distance runner during college. It was free.
When I graduated, I went into the military. I had no debt and no assets. But I had a useful degree and my whole future ahead of me without depending on someone else to pay my way.
When Obama nationalized the student loan program, tuitions and student loan balances went through the roof. No competition among financial institutions. Loans guaranteed by the government. What could possibly go wrong with this taste of socialism?
I'm thinking a 2-year mandatory US military service could straighten out a lot of our snowflake problems.
Kurt should look up the concept of “odious debt” before he hurts himself virtue-signaling.
IMO you have to be a complete psychopath to have no sympathy whatsoever for the student population, who are as savagely and viciously preyed on by the system to a degree that would shock the conscience of anyone who had one.
You got your "free" degree, now you will pay for every generations "free" college after you till you die.
Let’s see....
We structure the society so that there is a constant barrage of lies to kids that college is the ticket to success
We take steps to discourage kids from adolescent entrepreneurial activity by demanding “licensing” and “training” and gov fees for jobs like washing windows, preparing meals, mowing lawns, baby sitting, etc.
We raise the minimum wage and/or constantly deride entry level corporate jobs, sneering at McDonalds “burger flippers” or (ahem) baristas as loser positions, rather than places to learn discipline, work ethic, skills in money management etc.
We give NO, ZIP, ZERO, NADA info on topics like debt, investment, basic business principles, simple math and accounting principles that small business operators use, making the gov indoctrination camps we call “schools” ONLY focus on “getting you ready for college.”
We eliminate all (or most) of the shop, DO/DE (we used to call that for the guys who went to school half days and spent the rest of the day learning auto repair, hvac, electrician skills, plumbing and carpentry skills etc).
We then fill colleges with worthless bureaucrats who teach nothing, but fill their time as administrative wonks running a social indoctrination gulag with wackadoodle ideas on everything from God to econ to environmental lunacy to sexual deviancy.
We throw money at students willy nilly and make it easier to go into ruinous debt than it is to get a fake id to drink at a bar. This money consequently goes back into the university system (wow! weird how that works, huh?) and inflates the prices. It is almost like it is, like, causative or something! No problem, we, the ENTIRE BANKING AND FINANCE SYSTEM, will lend you the money, b/c we know Uncle Sugar will make you pay it back! The dumbasses call it “capitalism” (but it is not) and support this “free market enterprise” because you can sign your name to a piece of paper.
So, see? We set up this entire net that is more effective than stretching a net across a river for spawning salmon at dragging in an entire generation of young, naive, idealistic dupes and enslaving them for life.
It is your fault, though. We bear none of the responsibility. You should have refused to listen to the lies we told you and avoided the honeypots we put in your path. Pay up, punk.
Disagree.
A con job put up by grifters called the American Education establishment needs to be punished.
These leftists stole from the future to fund their totalitarian views and entrench themselves in the system.
They need to pay. They are ruining the country with their ridiculous social policies and demands.
Endowments need to be taxed, and college and university assets need to be put up for sale. Time to put the Woman’s Studies Center up for sale.
Endowments total in the trillions of dollars and are tax exempt. Every school that has accepted federal loan backing needs to have skin in the game and the large endowments at the elite schools who have led the policies that have damaged the future by essentially enslaving a generation through false advertising and sales (think guidance counselors and recruiters) need to pay and pay dearly.
Selling a lie is morally wrong, and spreading the responsibility to the self satisfied elite leftists is the only way to correct this wrong.
Not through punishing the taxpayers.
I agree.
Incidentally, when Congress wrote laws that companies had to put aside money to pay their pension obligations those laws applied to Congress and government as well. Like virtually every company, the government was paying for pensions out of current revenues rather than putting aside money. Government realized it couldn’t raise taxes enough to put aside the huge amount such generous retirements required so they decided they would fund it through student debt. They outlawed other institutions giving out loans to students because they couldn’t take the competition as government rates had to be high. They also had to make it illegal for bankruptcy judges to discharge the debt. This is because bankruptcy judges always retired student debt first as a degree in Gender Studies has zero income potential and everybody knows that. Including the school that sold the students on their rosy future as Gender Councilors.
This is why no politician can do away with student debt, because they would immediately have to figure out a way to fund the bloated pensions of millions of retired and soon to retire government workers. All those present and former government workers vote too.
There is GOING TO BE a debt reset. We simply do not have an option about that. “We” cannot pay the debt that “we” (ahem) have piled up. We is in quotes b/c it actually has been piled up by a rapacious and evil central banking system for the sole purpose of transferring wealth and power to the top from the little people. They have destroyed actually everything this country was founded on, individual and states rights, freedom, refusal to engage in imperialistic foreign wars, and sound money. All these have actually grown out of, or been supercharged, by the money destroying federal reserve. We have come to the end of the tether, and the ONLY thing that can happen is the repudiation of this debt.
The only question is whether we will 1) see all assets destroyed by violent revolution or international war, and realize we just can’t pay it and not try 2) ruin the currency by inflation or hyperinflation, and thus collapse the government, to be replaced with .... who knows what or 3) We can repudiate the debt and live within our means, the same way someone bankruptcies and can’t get credit.
The third way is preferred, but is also the most difficult, calling for character and discipline. Therefore, it is my prediction that we will go for 2) and then maybe 1).
I see almost no hope for “the republic” though I am actually optimistic about the people who make up the backbone of what is left of the country. Our values work, and theirs don’t. Nowhere does this come our clearer than in the midst of societal collapse. It is scary, though.
If the government “gives” people “free” college, then the tuition will go up rapidly, forcing the taxpayers to pay more every year. More and more people will go to college and get degrees that are now worth very little. Those degrees will lose their value as everyone now can get one, “free.”
You will need one of those worthless college degrees to get a job at a car wash.
In the end, “free” college will have been a total disaster, as are all socialist schemes.
Hear me out. Any student costs above the national tuition cap has to be financed by the institution and that portion of the debt should be able to be discharged in bankruptcy under chap. 7 and 13.
My daughter and her husband paid back $60K in student loans in three years. They did what they needed to do. They ate beans and rice for those three years.
My daughter is 33 and is now a millionaire.
They had a plan. Made a schedule. Made it happen at all costs. Reaped the benefits.
Oh, and she is a nice person too.