Posted on 06/28/2019 12:02:01 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
For decades now it’s been a sellers’ market for American universities. Conventional wisdom held that the most important way to succeed in life was to get a college diploma, no matter the cost.
Perhaps you’ve noticed university tuitions going up and up. And up. Inexorably.
And so has the debt incurred by their students and those students’ parents. It now totals about $1.6 trillion.
This being another tedious presidential election season, such a massive debt burden has attracted the attention of feeding politicians seeking to reap votes from younger Americans tasked with repaying the loans they signed up for.
As we wrote here earlier this week, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro and a growing list of the growing field of candidates have announced various plans to make public school tuitions free and to forgive these massive debts using — you guessed it — new taxes on someone else, namely the well-to-do.
Now comes a new wrinkle in these schemes and the universities’ hopes of continuing to reap huge tuition increases.
A new poll of nearly a quarter-million Americans has found fully two-thirds of them have buyer’s remorse about their diploma, their major and the higher education experience in general. How much longer do you think folks are going to keep paying such fees that produce such dissatisfaction and unhappiness?
Not surprisingly perhaps, the new survey found the top regret was incurring immense debts for that higher education, a debt whose payments run on for many years, causing postponed marriages and families.
An estimated 70 percent of college graduates this year finished school with loans to repay averaging $33,000.
Even older baby boomers are incurring college debts as they return to school for training in new areas not affected by automation and other labor-saving methods. The survey by PayScale found that even Americans over age 62 had some $86 billion in unpaid debts, theirs or their childrens’.
The second largest graduate regret was their choice of college majors. Sen. Marco Rubio has noted in speeches that the occupational demand for Greek philosophers has not been good for about 2,000 years.
Three-quarters of humanities graduates expressed regrets over their choice of study areas, tied to their difficulty finding employment in those areas at higher paying jobs enabling them to pay down the debt.
Most satisfied were majors in math, science, tech and especially engineering. More than a third of computer science grads and four-in-ten engineering grads had no regrets about their area choice of studies.
Interestingly though, teachers expressed the least regrets over their career choices, second least to engineers, despite the chronically low pay of such educators.
“...Some cone head, somewhere, decided that students needed to be taught the Humanities in order to be “better” citizens....”
I visited with the head of the Mechanical Engineering dept. at my old Alma Mater not too long ago. He told be to be thankful that I went thru when I did. I asked why? He said that now, due to the demands of the SJWs, undergraduate engineering students are now forced to take 18 semester-hours of SJW classes!!! I asked if the SJW students needed to take 18 hours of engineering and he busted a gut laughing out loud and said, “No, they’d all flunk.” He said that they forced it on them thru the accreditation body. In order for the department to stay accredited, they had to do it.
That’s 18 hours wasted on useless BS that should be going towards engineering electives. To get the old-style undergraduate engineering degree today, a student now has to go on to graduate school (more $$$ and time) all due to the BS from lib SJWs. Like I said, liberalism destroys everything it touches...everything.
Yes that’s true. My daughter’s friend made it worse for herself to be with her boyfriend she went a nursing school halfway across the country. After a year it lost it’s accreditation & they broke up. She finished at a university near her home (Lived at home!) now is getting married. she paid for the local college by being an EMT. (Paid out of pocket for that training!) EMT & college- Hard row to hoe, long hours, weird hours but now probably the nurse you would want in an emergency! Getting married soon different guy.
Agree!
I know a few kids who want to be vets so they can be around animals; mostly pets, not farm animals. I tell them all to learn to groom dogs with the plan to start their own shop. They can save eight years of tuition and start earning money immediately. No student loans.
In my semi rural area you can’t get an appointment for weeks, and Saturdays are 2 -3 months out. At $40-50 apiece, with not much overhead, and less than a vet’s office, those folks are making a dang good living. Adding a kennel and fancy treats are other revenue streams.
Add the layers and layers of administrators at $100,000+ a year to the cost.
What the hell do colleges/universities care what their students think. The government is paying the bill with massive student loans. They could care less what the students or parent think.
...No job openings for African culture studies
______________________
What about women’s studies, Feminism, Gender studies? They all can’t be not hiring.
And yet, the degrees are no walk in the park! Computers and the software that runs on them are just too complicated. How many large tech companies are not a technical disaster scene, behind the scenes?
Yep! Leftists should be shipped to a deserted island. The extra costs associated with their evil is unbelievable.
Come on up to Detroit.... you cannot beg borrow or steal an engineer
Quote Heinlein - they’ll never speak to you again. :)
"There is a ready solution for anyone on the public payroll who feels that he is not paid enough: He can resign and work for a living. This applies with equal force to Congressmen, Welfare 'clients', school teachers, generals, garbage collectors, and judges." -- Robert A. Heinlein
The response would be “Who’s Heinlein?”
/s
It’s because they are bringing over so many Indian techs it depresses the salaries. You cannot find a job in tech in a large corporation where one half to two thirds of the staff aren’t Indian.
It’s new in that just 40 years ago nobody was being told they had to go to college to succeed. Maybe you’re too young to know.
Not entirely true. My daughter did extremely well in high school earning advanced IB credits in calculus, physics government, etc. She had multiple academic scholarship offers from 3 universities. The advanced credits allowed her to finish a 5-year music education program in 4 years. She is now a public school elementary music teacher. She is paid ok, but she also loves it. Loves teaching children to sing and play instruments. A lot of teachers have no regrets, because they love teaching kids.
I dimly recall that the law was changed around 2002. Student debt used to be dischargable. I wonder if lawmakers intended to have the current abusive situation.
Before 2002. It was Bill Clinton who made it non-dischargeable.
If you're cluelles, someone will rip you off. Why is education any different?
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