Posted on 01/30/2016 7:31:23 PM PST by TigerClaws
Every once in a while, when Iâm feeling overwhelmed, I watch college commencement ceremonies on YouTube.
These rituals remind me how perverse our higher-education system isâand of the empty idealism that colleges and universities sell us:
We are here today, donning our ceremonial robes and caps, to recite the traditional vacuous platitudes and wish you well in paying off high-interest student loans for which we are in no way held accountable.
Let us now further romanticize our fair institution by singing the alma mater and conveniently forget that tuition has gone up 1,120 percent since 1978. Good luck out there, kids!
Iâm a consumer of those vacuous platitudes and a victim of this system. After finishing my masterâs degree in 2008, I found outâas in, I didnât already knowâthat I had $200,000 in student debt.
Some well-paying professions might make this amount manageable, but for a bioethicist like me, itâs been crushing. Many things had to go wrong for this to happenâor right, if youâre a school or a lender. Although the hefty amount I owe is unusual, my experience is not: Motivated by an idealistic view of education and career and vulnerable to predatory, disingenuous, or at least negligent institutions, young people and their families too often take on large amounts of student debt.
No matter how much they owe, the consequences of that debt can be outsized. These young people may have to abandon their educations early; pay back far more, after interest, than they took out; manage exceptionally exploitative loan terms; shoulder serious, chronic mental distress; delay important life decisions; and participate less in the economy than they otherwise would.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
As soon ad Trump is president, it should be mandatory that any institution receiving federal dollars provide each student with a PnL, Cash Flow and Balance Sheet for their institution.
Students need to be educated on the true cost of their education, which is bloated due to salaries and pensions.
How can anyone sign for loans and not have any idea how much they’re borrowing?
It's called 'being a Liberal.'
It’s the liberal colleges that are ripping the kids off..
Did he put it all on the 50 credit cards he had since freshman year?
Great comment. Every class room used to have posters on the walls telling freshmen they could get a credit card with a thousand dollar line of credit.
The real problem is that the schools keep raising the prices so they can pay the tenured professors outrageous salaries. So, for the students to be able to attend the schools they have to make the loans large enough to cover the universities’ cost.
It's someone who tells you that it's okay to kill tens of millions of little babies in the name of "choice." You need them so that you can point to an "expert" to justify your participation in mass murder.
And your "expert" will be someone who doesn't know how much debt they contracted to get the little piece of paper that says they're experts on ethics.
$200,000 in student debt. Yeah, not smart.
LOL apparently.
Obama promised that, too. Hasn’t happened yet and it won’t.
Exactly.
“WTF is a “Bioethicist”, and why do we need them?”
Probably saw “Beetlejuice”, and thought he was studying to be a ‘bioexorcist’.
(Okay, sounds far-fetched, but this is a guy who put himself $200,000 in the hole, and didn’t even notice until the bills started to show up).
This young man decided to go to a college with a very expensive tuition. Too many people care about the status of a college.
In my house, my sons were given this advice: NEVER go to a college unless you can go WITHOUT incurring any debt. That means you must either earn a full scholarship OR start out at an affordable county college and transfer later.
Unless Son#1 makes a mistake later, as of now, he’s on course to graduate from university with NO debt whatsoever, a nearly-perfect GPA, and a STEM degree. If he can’t find a STEM job after graduation, well, at least he won’t have any debt to pay.
That adjusts to $36K in debt now but still I did it. Many others did too. Why is it now such a crisis in an election year?
Maybe Twelfth Century Tibetan Poetry would have been better.
Your job and others are great and needed just as those with college degrees are great and needed.
Broad brush.
They try to convince us it is OK to pull the plug on granny.
Because Bernie wants free college.
The real problem is federally backed debt that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy.
The market would never support these absurd loans. But logs want to keep funding liberal colleges.
Ping to myself for tomorrow.
Bioethics is the study of the typically controversial ethical issues emerging from new situations and possibilities brought about by advances in biology and medicine.
If he works for the government for 10 years the debt is forgiven, not sarcasm.
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