Posted on 05/13/2012 8:32:20 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is working two jobs and will soon move in with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her.
"If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also," said her mother, Marlene Griffith.
Griffith, 23, wouldn't seem a perfect financial fit for a college that costs nearly $50,000 a year. Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams.
"As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it," said Griffith, a marketing major. "But when I graduate, I'm going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that."
With more than $1 trillion in student loans outstanding in this country, crippling debt is no longer confined to dropouts or graduate students. Now, nearly everyone pursuing a bachelor's degree is borrowing. As prices soar, a college degree statistically remains a good lifetime investment, but it often comes with an unprecedented burden.
Ninety-four percent of students who earn a bachelor's degree borrow to pay for higher education -- up from 45 percent in 1993, said a New York Times analysis. This includes loans from the federal government, private lenders and relatives. For all borrowers, the average debt in 2011 was $23,300, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
At Ohio Northern, recent graduates with bachelor's degrees are among the most indebted of any college in the country.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
Part of the solution is cutting useless degree programs that are subsidized by programs that generate both money and jobs, where engineering and nursing majors pay extra to support liberal arts and ethnic studies. Another solution is to say “I’m sorry, you’re not 4 year degree material, go to trade school” - so the college has fewer remedial students, repeat coursework and kids who drop out without a degree.
#10. Require a minimum proficiency in punctuation.
Whenever government money is injected to help the “poor” the providers of goods and services simply raise their prices so the poor are still strapped.
It is what happened to Section 8 housing.It is what happens every time.
Yes, that is true. I do not support a bailout of student loan debt, because that would simply reward the institutions that caused the problem. If we do nothing about the debt, then students will start approaching their education as a business, which they should. When this happens, colleges will have to respond.
State governments need to audit their schools and keep a tight lid on their expenses. They should not be able to raise tuition rates far above the rate of inflation.
And lastly, we should be pushing towards completely reforming education in this country, because it is an obsolete business model. The model has not changed in a thousand years, from when the cost of storing and transmitting information was orders of magnitude higher than now. Today we can retrieve almost any useful information nearly instantly anywhere we happen to be with our smartphones. Why is it that when the cost of information is the lowest it has ever been, that the cost of education is nearly as high as it has ever been?
Kelsey, you don't sound bright enough to even attend college.
As long as there is such a thing as “Student Visa’s” then the government will be interfering in the market. Do you propose the Govt:
Do away with the VA education benefits for our soldiers?
Do away with research grants to universities?
Cancel the Student Visa program.
No longer back student loans?
Cancel all federal grants to universities?
I respect your purist conservative / federalist beliefs. However proposing any of these things in a National Platform would be electoral suicide.
I think the only important issue causing the high prices of college is that you cannot discharge your debt in bankruptcy. The money would not be there in loans if the borrower didn’t have to pay it back.
That's strange. You don't know anyone who went to a community college and lived at home or anyone who attended a state college?
Anybody contemplating college needs to look at the FAFSA calculation documents. NEVER have funds in the kid’s name-FAFSA will have it ALL going to tuition. Parents should minimize assets in their names as well. Use assets to pay off debt, especially mortgage (home equity is not counted as asset by FAFSA)
Education does not create jobs in the wider economy. In fact you need an increase in the number of jobs before you require an increase in education.Society needs more savings to provide the investment capital that creates the jobs. Less loans = less debt = more savings = more investment = more jobs = more demand(real) for education.
Governments love stealing money/wealth from future generations and giving it to the present generation to buy votes.
This is what the national debt is - massive state theft from the unborn.
Thus it is easy for the government to goad naive young people into robbing themselves of future wealth.
One measure to replace all your measures: have all colleges underwrite all student loans, and have these loans be dichargable in bankruptcy. Overnight, all worthless majors will be dropped, and no unprepared student will be accepted.
Did you bother to ask anyone?
Stupid parents and stupid students because these fools think that any degree will provide a good job. In fact most degrees would not get you a job in the field where you majored let alone get you a good job. The vast majority of arts degree are totally worthless in the real world of employment but the stupid parents let their children get into these majors not thinking for a second that there is no good jobs for their children if they chose these majors. The famous and extremely dumb statement by moronic but proud parents "my son/daughter has a college degree", the question is what type of degree does your son or daughter have, but the moronic parents do not even bother to think about it for second. The stupid students chose these worthless arts majors because they can damn party all night, get drunk, etc... without the fear of failing something that it is very easy to pass, IQ required for these arts majors is somewhere between 95 to 105 i.e no high intelligence and no hard work is required
The schools themselves are running this huge scam because they are not forced by law to show the students what is the actual return in the real world on the money they pay for their degrees. They are not forced by law to tell the student what does he or she expect to earn for the degree he or she is studying based on actual market job data.
Well of course they’re in debt. How else are they going to get the money to pay for it, if they want to go to school full-time? They might have part-time jobs, as well, but that money won’t pay for their education. Many of my generation, graduating almost 40 years ago, also had debt, but we were in school before inflation hit colleges, and the cost of education went through the roof.
And, I agree with everything you said.
The acorn certainly did not fall very far from this Government Employee Tree.
Your an idiot. A paramedic might be a government type....thank God for them. You can just save yourself the next time you are having a heart attack. The pre-school teacher is NOT a government employee who makes probably around 7 dollars an hour. Your snarky comments are not even factual. Idiot!!
And what do you think of Foreigners flooding our Universities driving demand sky high.
RE: Does the article ever mention, even in passing, what degree Ms. Griffith was graduated with?
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The article states that she is a MARKETING major. Which is to say, she has a business degree.
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