Posted on 10/30/2011 1:32:44 PM PDT by Kaslin
sort of a poetic justice in student loan forgiveness: the “education” isn’t worth the paper the diploma’s printed on.
It certainly is a social nightmare - a generation of over-credentialed self-worshipping layabouts.
I would have agreed with you just a few months ago, but I've been talking to my students at our cheap community college. Virtually all of them are taking student loans even though the annual cost of attending college is around $5,000 per year. 40 hours @ $8 per hour, you only have to work 16 weeks to make enough to pay for college (not including living and transportation expenses ... just tuition books, and fees).
The money is too easy to obtain and too loosely controlled for most students to refuse. I don't blame them for grabbing what seems to be a good deal. I DO blame them for not figuring out the real cost ... and I make a point in my classes to ensure they know what those costs will be.
...prescription for making higher education affordable seems likely to yield the same results as his plan for curbing health care costs; that is, it is likely to drive prices higher than inflation.
You are probably one of very few that are informing your students about what their costs are going to be t pay back time.......
Actually, today’s college experience is like an extention of high school.
It is a terrible waste of time and money to live in a dorm or peer filled residence, partying with peers and attending classes with no engagement in the working adult world (experience and networking) while the student choses to go into debt. It is social and personal growth stunting for a young adult.
It is especially bad for young adults who don’t have connections for jobs when they get out of college and have nothing to offer but general college degrees and the socialization of a dorm rat. It is wrong to go to college and live on debt. But you really don’t find that out until you get out of college because reality is delayed.
Absent a rich daddy to pay for one’s college and upkeep, middle class students adopted a rich bank to loan them money with interest. They live the same as the spoiled rich kid - until they get out of college and are saddled with the debt to pay back and don’t have a rich daddy to help with job networks.
All this allows colleges to keep raising the costs and be unserious in education because student money appears to have no limit. If they were earning their own money, colleges would be pressured to keep costs and course offerings reasonable. If this college loan bubble bursts, daddy banksters should hold the bag for abetting a dysfunctional situation. Like giving mortgage loans to poor people...
It is interesting how much college tuition inflation resembles medical cost inflation. And both probably track perfectly with the federal government moving into the picture and subsidizing things.
Really suddenly, colleges will stop admitting students who are not college material, and will stop offering useless majors.
>>It is a terrible waste of time and money to live in a dorm or peer filled residence, partying with peers and attending classes with no engagement in the working adult world<<
That has been college forever. The difference is that today it can be extended next to forever and kids pursue diplomas in useless and sometimes harmful lefteral arts degrees like black womyns studies. That combined with the expectation that all of them are above average while performing below average is where the mess really is.
No, it was not the way it used to be. Most people had to work and get degrees. They still do - only they don’t know it until the debt bill comes due.
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