Perhaps because my parents had been through the depression, I had a deep and abiding fear of debt. My children are a few years out of college, and I made sure that they graduated without any debt. But for the past thirty years or more, the idea of borrowing for college and worrying about it later has been sold to people. People are going to expensive private colleges when much cheaper public colleges would do. The idea seemed to be that a college degree is you ticket to high earnings and that any debt would be easy to repay. For some, the amount of debt is so large that it hinders them financially, and for others, they earn so little that the interest on their loan causes it to increase faster than their ability to pay it down.
This is a problem and will be a much bigger problem in the future. I don’t know what the solution is. But I am tired of acting responsibly, doing without, and then being asked to pay for the mistakes of people who lived and live in a alternate reality.
The depression-era generation valued education as a means to a better existence. In modern America we have almost come to worship college education and degrees as idols of status symbols. Expensive but empty ones at that....Anything that godless liberalism contols eventually comes to devalued ruin. Really no surprise here.