“The banking-higher-ed system is saddling these kids with debts they will not be able to pay back in twenty years. Easy money empowers the creeps, snakes and most vulgar to wipe out the herd. Where are the adults? These kids, most of them, come out of coddled lives in public schools where they no real math skills. Most can’t balance a checkbook, much less have any real idea of what even simple interest on a loan is. They accept what their elders tell them, and that message is dominated by the ones pushing these loans. Used to be no kid could sign a contract for such an loan until they were 21. The older generation changed that too. The ‘older’ generation dumbed down math in schools, lowered the age of contract, created a cultural atmosphere of buying on credit.
The ‘older’ generation took plush jobs, tenure, pensions, benefits, sabbaticals, in universities en masse — like fat slobbering over-fed house cats, not worried at all for the student life experience — which is amoral chaos at best and tragically immoral indoctrination at worst. Layers and layers of edcu-crats added to the cost burden, the bills for colleges are through the roof. Almost nothing rose faster in cost than a college degree.
Can you pay back a $100,000 plus loan making less than #35K a year?
That 35K a year is high today except in some fields. There just aren’t many jobs.
You paid your debt because you were damn lucky, in timing and in many things.
The kids trusted the older generation, their teachers, parents, society. We f**ked them over. We are f**king them over. That’s the truth of it.”
Granted, higher education has become a big racket over the last 30-40 years but to suggest that the fault that these students borrowed way too much money and now struggle to pay it back is the fault of anyone other than the borrower is irresponsible in itself. Most students have used good judgment when taking out student loans and most pay back what they owe. This woman is the exception. Unfortunately for her, she is learning a painful lesson.
The parents and the school system is the root cause of the problem. It’s that simple.
Should young adults have been smarter before taking out massive loans, of course.
But who advised these kids all their lives growing up, beating into their brains that if they dont go to a good college that they will amount to nothing in life? And that if they do go, they will get a dream job, a dream house, and live happily ever after. That was the PARENTS that brainwashed their kids into thinking that way. And the universities played into it. Tuition costs have soared. And someone is making a hell of a lot of money.
I worked in debt collections a couple of years ago. A big company, I worked on some of the big student loan accounts. I can't tell you the whole picture from that, because by the time we got an account it was in outside collections. That's a later stage of the being behind in payments cycle. But I can tell you there are a LOT of young kids just a few years out of college in collections. And way too many get garnisheed. They literally live on a few hundred dollars above the table a month, after the garnishment. You try that.
USAToday article from 2006:
Nearly half of twentysomethings have stopped paying a debt, forcing lenders to "charge off" the debt and sell it to a collection agency, or had cars repossessed or sought bankruptcy protection.I suspect that you are wrong, WAY wrong when you say that "Most students have used good judgment when taking out student loans and most pay back what they owe." I know a lot of kids in there twentysomethings, and that is NOT the case.
NONE of them understood fully, or close to fully the weight of the loans they were taking on. Just as your model of the actual condition is, imo, way off and even delusional because of abject ignorance -- not knowing what you do not know -- so too was theirs when they signed up for the loans.
Most of the ones I know are making a good faith and earnest effort to repay the loans. But I already know that in a few years a significant number will have encountered some economic upset -- sickness, injury, loss of job -- that they will not be able to recover an honest hope of paying back what are for some ridiculously high debt burdens for the field they are in.
It's just the kind of thing my very old school Scottish Bank Examiner, and trainer of examiners, left the trade because of. That the lenders had abandoned any semblance of due diligence in making loans. He died seven years ago in his late nineties, he had worked long into his seventies.
Old school bank loans were HARD to get. But that difficulty meant nearly all were repaid, and the borrowers and the bank both were enriched and happy. He'd NEVER had lent 50,000 to train a woman to be a Kindergarten teacher, or such similar follies of modern 'higher ed'.