Hope your dad paid: These joyful Harvard Law grads may soon find that even their elite degrees don’t justify enormous loan burdens.
Posted on 05/29/2012 5:19:29 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
I’ve been writing for years about a bubble in higher education: too much demand, causing sky-high prices — all because of cheap government money, much like the housing bubble. Now those warnings have become conventional wisdom — so conventional that they’ve reached The New York Times and even 60 Minutes.
Pretty much everyone agrees that the increases in tuition (which have vastly outpaced consumer prices and family incomes) and the growth in student-loan debt (which now exceeds credit-card or auto-loan debt) are unsustainable. As economist Herb Stein famously said, something that can’t go on forever, won’t. So, how should we respond?
For students, piece of advice No. 1 is: Don’t go into debt. When I went to law school, back in the ’80s, I turned down free rides at a couple of excellent schools to go to Yale Law School, even though it meant taking on a lot of student-loan debt. I’m not sure I’d advise anyone to do the same thing today, even to go to Yale Law, the undisputed king of the law-school rankings — and I’m positive I wouldn’t make a similar tradeoff for many other places, even Harvard Law.
Debt is what gets people into trouble in bubbles: They borrow heavily because they think the value of what they’re buying, whether it’s a house or a tulip, will go up. When it stops going up, they’re sunk.
Today, the value of an education isn’t going up, but the price is. That’s a bad combination. So don’t borrow heavily.
That’s good advice for schools, too. Those that borrow money based on the expectation that tuition revenue will continue to increase will have problems, and, in fact, some already are. Instead, schools should be looking to cut costs and increase value
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
In a way the bubble has started to burst. A growing trend is for students to graduate early by accumulating credits in high school and community college during the summer. WSJ reported graduation in 3 to 3 1/2 years. My son will graduate in three years which means a 25% revenue loss for the school. If one attends community college for 2 years then finishes at a four year school, that is a 50% loss in revenue.
If a kid is not a scholar, a junior college for 2 years, then the state university is the way to go.
I owe 0.00 on college debt. I went for 2 years during high school, the high school paid the bill (thank you John Q tax payer)..
I do nothing in the field I went to school for now. I am doing much better in my first year in my new field than I did in my best year during my 15 years in the field I went to college for.
I have friends with 4 year degrees who can’t find work. Me, I have them begging me. Being book smart does not mean you can do the job. Proving you can to the right people gets your name out there and the phone does the rest of the work for you.
That’s been going on for years. Trouble is, the four-year schools won’t always accept outside transfer credits (as I learned the hard way).
He said in EVERY men's room he used were facilities for muslims to wash their feet for their five times/day prayers.
F islam. FUBO.
I have a nephew who keeps harping on “Student debt forgiveness.”
I keep asking him “what was the caliber of the gun they held to your head when you promised to repay that which you borrowed?”
He, being a liberal (AKA “those with no money of their own”) keeps saying “we should support education.”
When I press him, he gives up (since he can’t win).
The idea that loans are sacred obligations that must be repaid is lost on this generation (and, from some FR responses lost on my generation as well).
I am pretty sure the official motto of the USA is “boo hoo, poor me! I chose badly! FIX MY BOO BOO!!”
>>He said in EVERY men’s room he used were facilities for muslims to wash their feet for their five times/day prayers.<<
I would have pissed in them.
Seriously.
And the scools spend every dime. They have bloated the administrations while the cost of scooling increases to the rate of inflation by double or triple. and over a decade...or two, the cost of school is waaaaaaay overpricved , so the students incur far more debt then should normally be had.
Second: I work in Afghanistan and I have a bird's eye view of life here. Most don't pray, or pray very little. Most don't wash religiously.
Third: Muslims demand these hyper-religious accomadations in the US just to be annoying.
It's one thing to go into debt when you have awesome prospects, like 2 of my cousins, one of whom has law firms fighting over her once she finishes law school, and her brother, who had to decide which of 9 med schools to attend, after having graduated with degrees in biology and microbiology from Stanford with a 3.98GPA.
They're way smarter than I am.
Mark
Several thoughts and observations:
- colleges and universities MUST stop the “grievance McStudies” degrees.......Black Trangendered Studies is political propaganda and sin....not scholarship
- the trend has already begun to charge STEM majors (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) more tuition than for your crap like Wimins Studies. It should be the opposite.......charge the productive degrees that require tons of work the lower price
- slash the living hell out of budgets........get rid of every “Diversity Chair” and associated crappola. Fire all of them
Education spending is nothing more than a slush fund for liberalism.
Well said.
Unlimited subsidized loans to students
Allows grossly overpriced tuition
Allows huge salaries for liberal profs and admins
Who make significant donations to Democrats
and repeat....
Great comments from someone who is on the scene. Thanks!
Question:
If student loans were to be “forgiven” by the government, and the banks were to issuing institutions, why would any taxpayer approve of future loan guarantees by government, since, it will be a one way street and the loser is always the taxpayer.
Question:
If banks are the lending institutions for those student loans, and students are then forgiven those loans, why would any bank ever again make any loans to students?
Question:
Why would any business ever want to hire any graduate who started out his professional career wanting and getting his student loans erased from “personal responsibility”?
That's NOT the problem. It's liberal elites feeling they can work 8 hours a week and be paid $200,000 a year.
That's not the only way they rip off students and their parents ...
Colleges and the rip-off professors and administration put out textbooks that change frequently so students can't buy 'used' books.
Had a friend years back that used to write some of them - the publishers told him to make a few changes, they would change the cover and voila - college students would be screwed again by those 'oh so compassionate' liberals.
GREAT NEWS!
Headline should be:
“College Students Learn Government Debt Ruins Their Lives.”
Yes, students ARE learning something useful in college...
Truth is, you really don’t want to shake their hands.....for cleanliness reasons.
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