Posted on 06/20/2019 12:36:07 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Millennials are already aging out of higher education. The class of 2019 is the last of the generation to graduate college.
Like many of their generational peers, this year's grads are walking into an affordability crisis for young Americans. It's triggered by several factors, including rising living costs, increasing student debt, and the ongoing fallout of the recession.
Multiple studies show that millennials have less purchasing power than previous generations did at the same age. While millennials have benefited from a 67% rise in wages since 1970, according to Student Loan Hero, that increase isn't enough to keep up with inflating living costs.
The Pew Research Center defines millennials as those born between 1981 and 1996, or those turning ages 23 to 38 in 2019. While younger millennials are entering into a stronger economic situation than older ones did, a variety of factors may keep them from reaching some of adulthood's key milestones.
Student-loan debt is at record levels College tuition has more than doubled since the 1980s. Consequently, millennials have taken on at least 300% more student debt than their parents, according to Michael Hobbes of HuffPost. Baby boomers had to work only 306 hours of minimum wage to pay off four years of college, he found, while millennials would have to work 4,459 hours.
As of 2019, student-loan debt is at an all-time high with a national total of $1.5 trillion. According to Student Loan Hero, the average student-loan debt per graduating student in 2018 who took out loans was a whopping $29,800.
The weight of this debt is hindering millennials' ability to save. More than half of indebted millennial respondents in an INSIDER and Morning Consult survey said attending college wasn't worth the student loans.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Perhaps they should have learned skills for a real career.
One out of three ain't bad for the media. But inflation has remained low and the economy and jobs are booming - so yes they have debt and they need only work at a job to pay it down.
I don’t get it. Yes, certain cities are more expensive to live in than others. That’s been true for quite a while, long before these millennial college graduates came of age.
Is the implication that these graduates should all be able to afford a house in expensive cities?
Some can; I personally know a few. But those I know were able to avoid crushing student loan debt, among other factors, in managing their personal finances.
While this may be interesting information, I’m sure I’m missing the point of this.
so yes they have debt and they need only work at a job to pay it down.
Quite true.
All of us have faced financial challenges in our lives.
All of us have made decisions which we may regret, but still have to work with.
Students who took out enormous loans may regret it, if they aren’t able to get a good paying job to pay off the loans.
This touches on other issues, such as, borrowing for college can make sense, if you get a marketable degree, which puts you on a career path where you will earn good money.
I get the impression that too many of these kids took out loans, but got degrees which aren’t marketable.
What a bunch of crap. Millennials took on huge amounts of debt to get useless degrees and now they can’t understand why their job, such as it is, doesn’t allow them to buy the house they want in the location they want. Whoever raised these kids to be so entitled did them a terrible disservice. Now the leftists are pandering to them by promising to alleviate their debt. What a mess.
Another piece of what I suspect will be a relentless PR campaign to prepare the ground for student loan forgiveness.
Big industries who lust after Millenial spending (cars, real estate) are onboard.
Students need to learn to go to community colleges and then transfer to schools of choice after their second year. This will hold down debt and allow them time to decide on a productive degree. Schools are not doing them a favor with high costs and low value degrees.
These kids must have shitty jobs, if any job. Or, they spend too much on frivolous stuff.
BTW, my future wife (at the time) and I bought our first house in 1986. At a 10.5 percent rate!
“Perhaps they should have learned skills for a real career.”
The reality of how unemployable degrees have been for decades has never entered the minds of these idiots er people.
They have ignored that reality and borrowed tons of money for worthless degrees, IUD’s, Instant Unemployment Degrees.
Now, their parents and they are stuck often with over $100 k in student loan debt and no way to pay it back.
They and their parents still make a couple of trips per day to high priced coffee houses of coffee/tea/muffins at very high prices. They own the latest Apple phones, tablets and IMacs, and their tv cable bill start at a couple of hundred $’s for the basics.
They have never budgeted for anything nor saved regularly.
They laugh at us old goats for shopping on line or in person at Walmart and/or Costco and online for Amazon’s deals.
Now, they will vote for whom ever will pay for their student loans and other debts, healthcare and housing.
If we ask ourselves a very basic question about what the purpose of a university education is, it raises sobering questions about what a university education truly is at this point in time.
It’s clearly NOT about learning to think for yourself and have an open mind, as university faculty don’t tolerate opposing views very well - and teach a very finite world view that is intolerant of other viewpoints.
It’s clearly NOT a training ground for jobs in the marketplace. If you want to train computer scientists and programmers, for example, you could probably do that better (and cheaper for the students) at focused computer science learning centers.
STEM types of degrees are very important, but could also likely be done better and cheaper at institutions focused on these degrees.
I do believe that a ‘classic’ education, with broad exposure to the arts and literature etc. is important and can play an important role. That said, what passes for ‘humanities’ in ‘higher’ education these days is not a ‘classic’ education.
So, why are Americans spending so much money on higher education, when it is failing them?
So they are debt slaves to the Socialists at the Universities. They should have thought about that.
“I get the impression that too many of these kids took out loans, but got degrees which aren’t marketable.”
My best friends wife has a Phd in Spanish Theater. She’s never held a job it’s relevant to. The difference is we all got our various degrees in the 1980’s Her loan debt for her BA, MA, Phd was just under 20k. I have 2x BA’s and a MA for 12k. I’d hate to think what the price of this would be now 30 years later.
Millennials took on student debt to live on and to party. The are the grasshopper in the ant and the grasshopper story.
I think it is funny that teachers who disdained math and science want to teach at STEM schools.
“Debt forgiveness” will be a campaign issue in 2020.
ObaMao's recession was followed by Trump's hot job market; the best in half a century or more.
A kid I know trained to be a railroad engineer and is making close to $70K per year. That isn't bad money, especially for someone just pushing 30 and living in SW Pennsylvania where a 2000 square foot ranch house can be had for about $150K.
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