Posted on 09/21/2025 4:27:47 AM PDT by CIB-173RDABN
This was very well written and I agree wholeheartedly.
The tragedy is that these kids are in debt for half their life with worthless liberal arts degrees. Theatre, humanities, dance, ethnic studies, finger painting, whatever. They often get them hoping to be teachers some day to keep the useless cycle going.
Nailed it. In addition, they blame Republicans for their poor choices and refusal to provide a path out of slavery.
Dreams are good. They give direction for the future.
However, they must be grounded in reality before we take action upon them.
Over my 45 years as a CPA, many people came to me with their dreams of starting a business. Without being critical of them, it was often very obvious that they would never be successful at living their dreams. I’ve watched many people throw away their homes, investments, retirement accounts and parent’s money in living their dreams without grounding in reality.
We have a saying that applies to fulfilling dreams, “The best laid long term plans will fail if there is short term bankruptcy. Short term is the grounding in reality.
I have a distant relative who killed themselves over inability to pay student debt. I don’t accept that at his age he was really aware of how soul crushing debt is. And how precarious it is to get skills for jobs which change completely in the evolving technology of AI.
my daughter got her bachelors degree in biology at community college and online courses. ZERO debt and she starts PA school next year. It can be done without becoming a debt slave
Student Loans are as bad as credit card debt that never gets paid off and continues to accrue interest. You can pay off $50 grand 3 times over and still have a credit balance accruing interest.
The interest paid is only deductible up to $2500 a year and capped when you earn $80 grand.
The interest rates are now tied to market, when they used to be relatively low - under 5%.
Although there’s no collateral, it seems to me that giving college loans on a closed-end credit basis - like a car loan - would serve everyone so much better than the crapfest going on now.
Once again, we can thank Bath House Barry for destroying an important componenet of American life.
Over my 45 years as a CPA, many people came to me with their dreams of starting a business. Without being critical of them, it was often very obvious that they would never be successful at living their dreams. I’ve watched many people throw away their homes, investments, retirement accounts and parent’s money in living their dreams without grounding in reality.
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I can think of other dreams that are more wishful thinking then possible. Take a young boy that plays baseball. He may have the dream of becoming a professional at it. The odds of his success are so small that they would have a better chance at winning the lottery. Think about it, he is just one of perhaps hundreds of thousands of young boys playing baseball, first in school, then High School, and here is the first cut, getting a scholarship to a college. He is now on the second step but there are still thousands of college baseball players, all of them good are they would not still being there, but the prize at the end, just how many of those thousands have a chance, perhaps a few hundred and then as they graduate there are even fewer openings on the various teams.
The young boy gave up his youth to prepare for a dream, a dream that required he had to prepare himself for, a dream that in reality the odds were against him.
And what happens if he is not selected to join a professional team (or one of their farm team), what does he do with the rest of his life, the life he did not prepare himself to live. This could also be said for anyone that wants to be an entertainer. No matter how good you are, success often demands more on luck than you ability.
Apply that to any “dream” and for many it turns into a night mare.
my daughter got her bachelors degree in biology at community college and online courses. ZERO debt and she starts PA school next year. It can be done without becoming a debt slave
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I fully agree. It can be done.
Cut back on foreign students and get the government out of the student loan business . Schools would have to lower their tuitions to a more realistic level (or go out of business)
Most what was said works for me!
University is not for everybody!
In my case I learned a manual skill, went
into the military, got a job when discharged
and consequently earned a university STEM degree.
while working full time.
I retired in Hawaii at age 55
with no debts.
Not everybody can pull that off.
One thing I do know.
Learn a manual skill
I know several.
Get an education in something
that is not Liberal theology.
stick to STEM studies.
If you aren’t good in school that is OK,
My plumber owns 10 houses more than I do.
I’m just as good of a plumber, but
he has a better back and I am an engineer.
The moral failure is lowering standards and creating degree programs to allow “anyone” to go to college. College was once the domain of the intellectual elite, the brightest of the bright, and the courses were intended to cull out the weaker members of the herd. Because of this, the degree had intrinsic value— you knew an engineer or physicist was a genius who was capable of innovating and leading on the frontiers of their domain.
In 1952 the post WWII students at the University of California, Berkeley, paid tuition of $37 a semester. Tuition cost less than the athletic card which was slightly above $50. In other words, every student could afford tuition. So what happened? The Regents that ran the system gave up their power to greedy administrators and academics. People who, only in their own mind, deserved it.
The Classic Liberal Arts degree was, for centuries, a way of creating informed, inquisitive and responsible dialogue-oriented young adults who would go out into the world and know which questions to ask. It did not mean they possessed knowledge, or an actual professional skill, it only meant that they were trained to think.
How did that “pay off”? For those who were not Scientists or Engineers they managed to enter many fields that gave them a job or career to follow up on or improve their lot.
For more than 50 years we now live in a degree to (hopefully) high paying career path with promises of not having to work hard, scrimp, save and sacrifice for something down the road. No, it is all immediate and instant gratification where manual labor was looked down upon because these new undergraduates were part of the “elite” and “nouveau riche”.
In short, it went to our collective heads and we became full of bravado, vice and hubris.
Now, we are literally paying for it.
You can sign up for the military.
And no poor schlub undergrad gets $60K in debt for one year.
Good points.
There can be a middle ground.
Dreams can be pursued part time with strict cost constraints while making a decent living.
They are called hobbies.
The more everyone is expected to go to college—and live out a 6-year party—the less a college degree means.
Combining with the implosion of our school system with the layering on of tech from dawn to the wee hours, we are now producing college students who function at an elementary-school level.
I have told this story before but years ago, my husband and I were at a restaurant discussing ‘shop’. Our waitress overheard I was a flight attendant and was asking questions as she had always wanted to be one. We spoke during our dinner and she confided she had just dropped out of an online college where she had taken out over a $20,000 school loan. She was just 19 and said she dropped out the second week as it wasn’t what she thought it would be. However, she was on the hook for the repayment and interest was accruing. I could see her life was over. She had no education, an unrepayable loan that would be ballooning within years and no job skills. It was just depressingly sad.
I think this loan business is purposeful as it destroys young adults and robs them of their ability to buy a home and support a family.
I’ve gone into high schools and taught classes for the students who are most likely to drop out of school. These students are very rebellious against authority and are a teacher’s nightmare.
I start by asking for a volunteer, a big guy who plays football. I explain that we are doing a demonstration for the class and just to act naturally.
We lock arms and get into a shoving contest, kind of like two bulls locking horns.
What they don’t realize is that I am moving them into a position where the teachers desk is near the back of their legs. When they are in position, I give a hard shove and they fall backwards onto the desk.
I use this example to show them that rebelling against other people or parents is like walking through life backwards. You can’t see the difficult experiences in your path as they are behind you and you experience all of them, just as the student did by falling on the desk.
I further explain that it is like crossing a river that is full of rocks’ debris, and rapids while rowing a boat. When rowing, you are sitting backwards and can’t see where you are going. You hit all the difficult obstacles.
If you crossed that same stream in a canoe or kayak, you are facing forward and avoid the obstacles. So it is in life.
I then go on to use the example of a young child learning to ride a bicycle. If the parents hold on too long, the child leans into the parents for balance and never finds their own balance. When the parent finally lets go, the child falls over and becomes even more dependent upon holding onto the parent.
A healthy parent will hold onto the bicycle at first, and run along, quickly letting go, but being there to catch the child if they fall.
The bicycle wobbles back and forth as the child tries to find their balance, separate from the parent. This is exactly what happens to a teenager’s consciousness as they are trying to find a separate self identity.
If as parents, we are too controlling and fail to gradually allow our children to find their own balance or identity, they will grasp a peer group and give into peer pressure as soon as they leave the parent’s household. This is why freshmen in college are so susceptible to peer pressure and indoctrination.
I’ve worked with many gays and lesbians who had an experience in the freshman dorm and then were validated as being part of the gay peer group. The gay community is very self validating.
Back to the child on the bicycle. If they sit still on the bicycle, they fall over. If they focus on a point down the road, they move toward it and are quickly off and riding, finding their balance in the process. That’s what a child’s individual dreams and goals do for them as they are developing. They give them a beacon to move forward. I don’t care if it a a profession or career, sports, or just graduation. These dreams in the future are very important. They need a goal in their future to move forward and find themselves in the process. (And before the child crashes into the tree they were riding toward, they need to pick a new goal to keep moving forward. So it is in life.)
The teachers feedback about the changes in these troubled students was immediate and profound.
The added bonus is that when a child develops an identity around who they want to be in the future, they adopt values and morals based upon that identity that are with them at all times, even when they leave the parent’s household.
Thus, I have them think about that person that they desire to be in the future, and ask themselves if their current behavior will guide them in that direction or close that door. For example, drug use record can really crush future job prospects. (Desiring to be a CPA, I knew that a drug bust in college would have closed that door, and stayed away from drugs.)
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