Posted on 05/31/2012 6:39:59 AM PDT by Michael.SF.
Even as total outstanding student debt rises to $1 trillion, lawmakers have yet to allow loans to be discharged in bankruptcy.
Without an escape clause, these loans can strangle a person.
Take 36-year-old Nick Keith, who remains $142,000 in debt eight years after graduating from culinary school. He's featured in a new film, "Default: The Student Loan Documentary," in which several college graduates expose the pitfalls of the private student loan industry.
"I want to educate the public about the facts," Keith said. "My life has become a daily swim in a tar pit with very little hope of ever getting out."
Keith's father only agreed to co-sign a student loan if he stuck with an engineering degree at Iowa State University, but even with decent grades, he knew it wasn't a right fit.
He dropped out sophomore year and later turned to the California Culinary Academy–without his dad as a safety net–hoping to put his love for healthy eating to use.
"The culinary academy commercials were on the Food Network every 15 minutes," he said, and only required 12 months of study with a three month externship.
He fell for their sales pitch, hook line and sinker
"I should have seen all the signs. [The campus tour guide] had a used car salesman answer for everything," Keith recalls.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Absolutely! And part of the scam is telling the students how "valuable" their degrees will be. I'm not the biggest fan of federal laws, but consumer protection laws should be extended to higher education.
Colleges should be required to keep, and provide, data on just how marketable their degrees are.
Then if the student still wants to gamble on a weak degree, it's his responsibility.
Bullshit! If the kid got the degree they need to pay for it, period. The ONLY reason to discharge a student loan would be if the student died or was totally disabled.
Geez the military would have taught him for free..then again he doesn't sound smart enough to qualify.
Actually, it was a total of $60,000. The rest is accrued interest. Still way too much to be a cook. He wanted a diploma from a fancy school so he could say he graduated from The Cullinary Institute for Crepe Studies.
"Higher education" wouldn't be free; it would be priced at a level where the students could pay for it as they went along with part-time work (delivering pizza, waiting on tables, painting houses in the summer, etc).
Don’t neglect the government creating the atmosphere for the massive hikes in college tuition. The “student loan bubble” is being fueled by government telling universities that :everyone should go to college” and providing cheap financing to do so. Sound familiar? Didn’t we just see this movie with housing? The colleges are simply balancing the supply/demand equation by raising prices. What I don’t know, however, is what happens when the bubble bursts...
I have a love of boozin it up, sleeping until noon and not showering and getting dressed for days on end but I knew it wasn't a growth industry so I decided to stick with the (real) sciences.
Making student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy again will instantly defund one of the Left's most nefarious schemes, put huge downward pressure on tuition rates, and smack the banksters right in their pig snouts at the same time. Couldn't happen to two nicer groups of anti-Americans. :)
Geez, I'd have taught him for $10K. Lunch included.
One can get a Class A cdl w training for about $2,500. The minimum requirement is 23 years of age, no felony convictions. In about a week of training, you can get your cdl. After srarting w a major carrier, you will be on your own in 6 weeks.
1st year trucking pays about 35k. Team drivers can easily make 50k the first year.
One can get a Class A cdl w training for about $2,500. The minimum requirement is 23 years of age, no felony convictions. In about a week of training, you can get your cdl. After srarting w a major carrier, you will be on your own in 6 weeks.
1st year trucking pays about 35k. Team drivers can easily make 50k the first year.
I'd love to see this as a platform item but it would be a net vote killer, not getter.
The independents react to "nice". This would be spun as a war on youth and education.
It's harder to demonstrate that thousands in debt, for a relatively low paying career; is not "nice".
"Nice" always wins independents, who decide things; until we can get the self loathing left to wake up.
He dropped out of engineering school when he realized they weren't teaching him how to drive a choo-choo.
I completely agree with you. Thanks to the idiot counselors at their high school, one of my children decided to be either a rock star or an actor and another pinned her hopes on being a singer. As parents, we suggested—no, DEMANDED, that they first continue to make good grades and find a way to make a living THAT WOULD SUPPORT THE LIFESTYLE THEY WANTED. After that, they were welcome to sing, dance, or whatever was decent.
Today, both are engineers with zero student loan debt. We hated to urge them to postpone their “superstar” dreams, however impractical, but now they are free and equipped to live life as they wish.
“Colleges should be required to keep, and provide, data on just how marketable their degrees are.”
The technical schools do it as well. get a MSCE and you’re guaranteed a 70k salary. Remember those commercials?
Michael: “lawmakers have yet to allow loans to be discharged in bankruptcy.”
Psycho: If people could discharge their student loans, there would be absolutely no reason to charge tuition at colleges. Higher education would be free.
Me: If people could discharge their student loans, in the near term a lot of lenders (not the schools) would be left holding the bag.
In the longer term, assuming that the gubmint no longer uses our money to make the lenders whole for these defaults, the surviving lenders will eventually get the idea that they should make more sensible loans, and no longer conspire with the ripoff trade schools. It would probably drive down the cost of both university and tradeschool education, which (as we all know) have been the engine driving up costs and tuitions over the past generation at least.
I got a parity error on that, but I was able to hit the red reset button and finish the sentence.
≤}B^)
ps. I do knowwhatchamean.
My part time jobs helped in other ways.
The restaurant always had left over salad and sandwiches. Sometimes the wrong topping resulted in a pizza being sent back to the kitchen (oops.)
The radio station was a good quiet place to study with hourly breaks to change the big reels of tape.
I had just over $1,000 in my checking account when I graduated. It’s hard for me to believe some of these $100,000 debt stories.
What’s wrong with these people ?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.