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DEBT LOAD FOR PRIVATE AND PUBLIC COLLEGES..
Total student loan debt has just crossed above credit card debt in America for the first time ever
An intended consequence of this is that non-Eric Holder's people bury themselves in student loans that are now owned by the federal government.
Get this: student loans are the ONLY debt you cannot escape through personal bankruptcy.
This means that the vast majority of kids graduating from college these days are indentured slaves to the federal government.
If you don't think Washington has plans to exploit this situation, you must be from some other planet.
ABC’s timing is SO OBVIOUSLY at White House bequest. I’d call them Stooges, but that would be a gross insult to the memory of Larry, Moe and Curly.
Welcome to the newest victim group. And Obama has already started to pander.
Like, who would hire an attorney who was stupid enough to have ammassed $150K in student loan debt, to work in the family business?
And who hasn’t yet realized that paying off $15K a year will mean a lot of beans and rice?
Oh wait, then there are the credit cards she is now living on ....
D.OH.
There are so many problems with student loan programs. The reality is the gov’t should never be involved with them. A (former) friend got through school on loans all the way through a masters degree in psychology & discovered she couldn’t get a job that she was willing to take. (Her internships had been in drug-related therapy & she didn’t want a job in that field.) She discovered that there was a 9-month grace period before she had to start paying back the loans, but if she enrolled in another class it put that grace period back another 9 months. So she regularly took an art class & hadn’t begun to pay off her loans 10 years after finishing her degree. We haven’t been in touch in some time, but I imagine she has continued to utilize that loophole.
before tenure was granted to protect communists from public scrutiny,
profs didn’t make more than the average company employee.
then came the boomer generation that expanded the universities into questionable activities
and padded salaries.
meanwhile, profs do not work as many hours as they did before tenure.
in sum, less work, more pay. and big universities with many non-essential employees.
What passes for a college education today is ridiculously overpriced, largely because the government will hand out money to anyone gullible enough to turn it over to a post-secondary school. The schools get more highly paid (and under-worked) staff and sparkling new facilities, while the kids get loans they will pay til eternity. The best solution to this self-inflicted problem is to cut off the money spigot ASAP.
I’m very confused about why I’m supposed to care about this....
Meanwhile, college endowments are rising too...
Harvard: $27.5 billion
Yale: $16.6 billion
Princeton: $14.4 billion
Univ. of Texas system: $14 billion
Stanford: $13.8 billion
MIT: $13.3 billion
Univ. of Michigan: $6.6 billion
Columbia: $6.5 billion
Northwestern: $6.8 billion
Texas A&M: $5.7 billion
Univ. of Penn: $5.7 billion
Univ. of Chicago: $5.6 billion
Univ. of Calif. system: $5.4 billion
All tax free.
Once again there is an expectation that someone is supposed to ride in and rescue people from the consequences of their choices. This article is silent about which colleges the young lady with $150,000 of debt attended. Were they the best value? Also, did her family not help at all? What kind of housing choices did she make? Did she work part time? Did she work summers? Why are taxpayers supposed to bail her out now?
And don’t even get me started on the way that colleges have ratcheted up their tuition rates above inflation whenever financial aid from the government increased. Talk about a conspiracy worthy of the Occupy movement. Why isn’t there an Occupy Education or Occupy University movement? They are the ones trying to make this generation a bunch of debt slaves.
The very intelligent young man who services my heat pump has a bachelor’s degree in sociology. Then he learned a useful trade and started his own business. He just bought a new truck and hired an assistant.
Except for certain professions, the American system of higher education is a black hole, lined with debt and indoctrination.
You can still graduate cheap. Go to a community college for the first two years and work a job. Then transfer to a 4-year school.
I also know some kids that went to community college while living with parents or family AND have a job. It ends up being TENS OF THOUSANDS of dollars in savings even if you pay rent to your folks.
And the really terrible news is that a vast percentage of those exorbitantly expensive "degrees" are in subjects that are worthless as training for working in a productive, capitalist society...
Of course, that is not news; we "hard scientists" who struggled with time-devouring lab sciences and rigorous math courses have long been disdainful of folks who coast through majors in "social basket weaving" subjects.
Many "women's studies", etc. majors fit their victims only for leftist government jobs -- or worse, the incestuous ("never held a real, productive job in their entire life") positions that increasingly infest academia.
No wonder the Far Easterners are kicking our economic butts!!!
My own experiences in teaching math in today's public schools, and a lot of anecdotal evidence says that kids today have especially poor basic match skills, especially of the sort needed to understand the cost of long term debt. This is despite SAT math scores rising since the late 1970s. How can it be that my experience bests the SAT score tracking? SAT math tests have been dumbed down! And why is that? The protection of the higher education industry.
Moreover teaching of the basic accounting and finance concepts needed to understand borrowing as an investment is exceedingly rare.
College costs have gone up at a rate beyond all other common lifetime expenses. The rate of unemployment for the recent college grads has gone up, also at an rate beyond that experienced by most alive. This means that the parent's and grandparent's sense of the value of an education, balanced with the long-term burden of loans for college, is not founded in experience, is at variance with that experience.
Student life has become a intense mix of ammorality, immorality and chaos, to which the each student will respond differently, but only a few without significant damage. Damage to the spirit, to the intellect and to to body.
Anarchy, Ignorance, and STDs.
Depression, brain-washing and arrogant rudeness.
Making exactly the kind of persona least likely to be able to pay back long-term debt either by inclination or ability and hampered by the kind of life-cycle accidents and bad choices the moral chaos in which the modern college soaks and drowns nearly all students.
Where do the big money come from? From big dadday government! Who gives a frig about Alumni anymore. Interest by the higher ed establishment in their alumni is diminishing quickly.
“student loans are quickly becoming the only way many Americans can afford a college education.”
No. Wrong. Bad reporting. Not objective. An outright lie.
Here in California, you can do your two years general ed for hundreds of dollars — not thousands — at any of dozens of community colleges.
Anyone can hold down a job and pay those fees as they go.
Then you transfer to the Cal State system or the UC system for your final two years. Ten grand a year for books and tuition.
And since one in eight Americans is a Californian, I’m on much firmer ground in asserting that THIS is how most Americans are affording college, you hacky ABC reporter.
This agenda-driven article is just trying to build the case that I’m somehow obligated to pay for someone else to go to the Ivy League school I couldn’t afford.
Public education is fantastic in California, but apparently it’s just not good enough for the entitled darlings who want East Coast validation, even if means borrowing a hundred grand. Then they can smug it up toward suckers like me who went to state colleges — and have no debt.
No sale.
“Because of my choice to attend college and law school, I live every day paycheck to paycheck and am forced to rely on credit cards to get by,”
Yup. It was YOUR CHOICE to go to law school right after college, instead of working for a few years to earn the tuition. I paid cash for my first 2 years after working for 4 years after college, took out commercial loans for the last year, and paid it off before my 4th anniversary of passing the bar. And that was a private law school. And I ain’t nobody special.
Colonel, USAFR