Posted on 10/06/2014 8:20:46 AM PDT by TurboZamboni
The question, "Is that degree worth it?" is coming up a lot more often these days. There's little question how "Lisa S." would answer.
Forbes.com tells the story of Lisa (her full name's not given), who's a 39-year-old Minnesota lawyer making about $20,000 a year and on public assistance. She is $350,000 in debt and realizes she'll probably die before paying it back.
Lisa started out studying at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design, graduating with under $25,000 in student loans that she paid off in two years. The problems began when she moved to California for a master's degree at the University of Southern California, hoping that it would open up new jobs. When it didn't, she sought out Pepperdine Law School, exiting with more than $275,000 in loans.
A single mother, she took another loan to help study for the bar, then had to take the bar again when she moved back to Minnesota, where the cost of living is lower.
(Excerpt) Read more at bizjournals.com ...
That is damn funny.
(Besides nobody ever said a lawyer has to be able to count!)
True, but the issue is that because of access to loans she chose the high price school rather than a lower price school.
You can take out student loans to pay your living expenses.
It is quite possible the extra 275K of debt is living 50K per year for three or more years while going to school in California, then letting it ramp up with deferrals and interest.
I understand. The issue is that if you can borrow to pay for living expenses rather than get a job then clearly you can rack up excess loans. Calling them student loans is misleading and a misnomer. I suspect that a significant amount of so-called student debt are people borrowing money who have no intention of seriously going to school or paying the money back. It is like saying that the foreclosure crisis was made up almost entirely of borrowers who told the entire truth about their income and expenses on their applications and were not involved in house flipping or other real estate investment schemes.
While not applicable for “Lisa”, the completion rates of students in State 2yr and 4yr Colleges are appalling. With many never coming back for a second year let alone graduating. The issue of student loans needs a much harder look than the kind of silly story in the article.
True. Minnesota accepts only 24% of its applicants; Pepperdine, 43%, with lower median LSAT and GPA scores.
I had a college friend who used the money to go out of state to a fancy liberal arts college, with more than half the money spent living out of state in the dorm, flying home Christmas, summer and spring break, all paid for by student loans.
All four law schools in Minnesota have a higher cost than the average cost of law school (University of Minnesota, Hamline University, William Mitchell College of Law, and University of St. Thomas).
If she wanted a law school close to California that had a lower cost than the U.S. average, she should have considered Arizona State or Arizona. Both are ranked higher than Pepperdine yet cost below the national average cost for law school.
Reminds me of a woman named Liz Randolph.
She was a radio newswoman here in Pittsburgh. She did the morning newsbreaks for Jim Quinn when he was spinning records on B-94. One morning he cracked a Lewinsky joke at her expense, and she ran out of the studio crying. Sued the station and got a large settlement, which she used to put herself through law school.
Quinn said the experience made him into a Conservative and he launched his conservative. talk show with Rose Tennant.
During the 2012 election Liz Randolph turned up in the newspapers, claiming to be bankrupt. She was living in the basement of a church in Philadelphia. Or so she claimed.
Sadly, it's difficult to state that any unconstitutional or illegal arrangement would be off the table anymore, with the lawless regime in charge.
But it shouldn't be FR posters who come up with these schemes.
sitetest
So the general point stands that the availability of student loans appears to make students insensitive to the price of a more or less commodity thereby ensuring that the prices will continue to track with the availability of student loans.
Colleges who sell worthless degrees should get no more protection than used car dealers who sell lemons.
Sounds nice in theory, but the inevitable path of the status quo is to continue to grow this monster until the entire house of cards collapses.
The loan and the product are not related, There is no requirement for any kind of loan either when attending a college or buying a big ticket item.
If someone takes out a loan, it is between the lender and the consumer. If the consumer buys something worthless, too bad, so sad, your contract to repay your loan is a sperate deal.
Fedzilla has made it part of the deal by giving easy loans for worthless degrees. The colleges have been very supportive of this sorry partnership by offering worthless degrees to ensure employment to far left professors.
No one is forcing anyone one to go to college. No one is forcing anyone to take out a loan.
Bad decisions and playing the victim are hall marks of liberals. It is always some one else’s fault .
These are expensive colleges. She must have had excellent grades or exam scores to even get into them. So if she’s so smart, as my dad would say, “why ain’t she rich?”
For example, many students attend a community college for their first two years before transferring to a major state university or other university. Why? Cost of education.
If every hamburger flipper and coffee mixer could be offered car and auto loans with similar loosey goosey loans . . . just think what that would do for the real estate and auto sales markets. For a couple of months, anyway.
There are many parties here to share the blame: the colleges that foist the loans on students, the federal government for encouraging the system, the politicians who voted for this, the parents who blithely allowed their children - and themselves - to get wrapped up in obscene debt, and the students, themselves, who are all supposed to be smart enough and mature enough to go to college, after all.
You demonize one party, but this isn't a case of bad guys (colleges) and innocent victims (students and parents). For those who were doing the borrowing, what part of the word “loan” did they not understand?
In any event, even if all that you said were totally true, and other parties shared no blame, that is hardly any excuse to try to foist unconstitutional solutions onto unwilling parties, violating important principles of contract law along the way.
That's democrap behavior.
sitetest
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