Posted on 12/03/2011 8:50:46 AM PST by SeekAndFind
A continuing refrain of Occupy Wall Street protesters has been “student debt is too damn high,” as James Surowiecki wrote in The New Yorker. In some cases — like for the college graduate profiled in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education who has $100,000 in debt and uncertain job prospects — this is unarguably true. But such cases make for dramatic reading precisely because they are so rare.
The first thing to note is that most of those with that much debt have graduate degrees; it is difficult to accumulate that much debt in an undergraduate program. The chart below shows the percentage of beginning undergraduate students who, six years later, had accumulated more than the indicated levels of debt.
Only one-tenth of 1 percent of college entrants, and only three-tenths of 1 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients, accumulate more than $100,000 in undergraduate student debt. If you have more than $75,000 in undergraduate debt, you are the 1 percent – just not the 1 percent you might have been hoping for.
(Excerpt) Read more at economix.blogs.nytimes.com ...
I love the excerpt’s last line. Who knew the Times had a sense of humor?
Have colleges make student loans - and be paid back with a percentage of what the student makes in the first 20 years after graduating. The 'basket weaver' major pays back almost nothing for a worthless degree... The enginering student pays back much more...
The result would be colleges taking an interest in their students well being rather than running the school for the glorification of puffed up liberal professors.
>>One wage earner supporting a family with a middle class lifestyle? That disappearred about 40 years ago. Thanks Nanny State.<<
I have no problem with it — my wife has never had to work a day in almost 20 years (and my ex-wife the same).
Maybe you chose your profession or avocation badly. We are importing H-1Bs left and right for engineering and IT jobs left and right. And NOT because of the lower wages they theoretically get. It is because we don’t have Americans with the right skill set(s). Just for the heck of it, I did a job search for my skill set (IT management for large ERP implementations) and came up with hundreds of possible jobs in about 5 minutes.
And I had some student debt which I paid off as promised. It isn’t the same as people today spending $200K for Graduate degrees in Ethnic Womyn’s Studies (I am not accusing you of that).
But if you do succeed in getting the Nanny State to pay off your student debts, remember to make it retroactive to the mid-1970s.
ps: The Gummint doesn’t CREATE jobs. It just interferes with job creation, Gen X and Millenials voted barry the zero in, they can live with the results.
Listening to them, I kind of got the feeling they all considered themselves "community organizers". Somehow the significance of their "community" being about as organized as your average "junk drawer" at the bottom of the kitchen cabinet never registered.
Have colleges make the student loans - and be paid back with a percentage of what the student makes in the first 20 years after graduating. The 'basket weaver' major pays back almost nothing for a worthless degree... The engineering student pays back much more...
The result would be colleges taking an interest in their students well being rather than running the school for the glorification of puffed up liberal professors.
Maybe. I'd be afraid the result might be the Democrats in Congress creating a Department of Basket Weaving so they could hire them and keep their liberal professor friends puffed up.
LOL! A wonderful summary!
My perception of the OWS crowd is that there are a lot of well-spoken (and by this I mean they have a good command of the English language) people among them who are overly "educated" in a formal sense (which explains the $100,000 in student debt) but very lacking in real-life skills. I suspect a lot of these folks have expensive undergraduate educations in fields that simply don't offer much in terms of lucrative employment, and many may have graduate degrees in professional fields where there is a huge imbalance between the enormous supply of workers relative to the number of jobs available in those fields. I'll use finance and law as two possible examples of this -- both of which involve inflated employment figures over the last few decades that were largely fabricated by unsustainable excesses in both fields.
I don't get the impression that there are too many unemployed auto mechanics or medical doctors among those OWS crowds.
The history of the student loan program is that it quickly got into trouble after its inception because students were defaulting on their debts by taking bankruptcy.
Congress got ahead of that ploy by students by passing legislation, later backed up by the courts, that virtually ended any forgiveness of loans for almost any reason.
Colleges are the pushers. They get their money from the government and never counsel the students that maybe their major won’t be able to provide them with enough money to pay the loan back.
And private lenders like Sallie Mae loved the government guaranteed program because it turned the students into virtual wage slaves until the loan was paid off as the ex=student had no way out. It was very profitable for the loan companies.
Now that the government has taken the program away from private companies, the participants can look forward to sequestration by government until the loan is paid off. They are now wage slaves of the Federal government.
Oh, wait a minute. They may get their loan forgiven if they teach —and join a government employee union. They’ll soon realize where their interests lie and vote that way.
About twenty years ago...my brother transferred from a community college over to the state university. He figured he’d have to put up around twenty classes over two years, and that they’d accept everything from the state community college. In the end, it was twenty-three classes that they required, and they pulled this one odd-ball business class out....for an electrical engineering class. There was basically nothing that he learned from this business class, and he challenged the counselor to explain the necessity...with the only response as “mandated”.
I suspect that the colleges are geared toward making cash in the end...no matter what kind of degree you want.
There's a great book titled "Under the Red Sea Sun" by salvage officer Cmdr. Edward Ellsberg. The Red Sea book told of his typically-innovative American approach to a wrecked Italian naval base in Eritrea in 1943. One of his many "impossible" projects was to raise a huge floating dry dock which had seven of eight compartments blown out and an unexploded bomb in the eighth. All the other salvage experts said it was either impossible or would take 50 divers and 200 mechanics six-months to raise, with no guarantee even that would work.
He did it in nine days, with a few American supervisors and some Italian POWS.
Alluding to your comment, he said "The trouble with 'experts' is that they know so much about how to do something a certain way that they cannot see any other method."
What you say is spot on, but in addition the Government has put student loans in a special category that cannot be easily discharged by hardship.
If the lenders had to take into account the degrees they were lending money for and the ability of the borrower to complete the degree. A lot of this foolishness would stop.
Right now the lenders have almost no risk and are encouraged to lend as much as possible. (no skin in the game)
If the student defaults they can often triple the amount owed through penalties.
Their are documented cases of former students committing suicide or fleeing the country to escape this debt.
To me it makes no sense to acquire much student loan debt unless your in a field like Engineering, Medicine, etc. and even then the debt should not exceed much more than 1/2 of what you could expect to be making 5 years into your career. (Ex: if you expect to be making 100K 5 years into your career, 50K in student loan debt).
Tucked into this article is discussion of another redistributionist scheme that I didn’t know of—that the interest on regular student loans is used to pay for Pell grants.
Please tell me that that sign is photo-shopped. If it isn't, then the school were this idiot got her degree should be charged with fraud, among other crimes.
5.56mm
Any one dumb enough to plunk down 100 thousand on something that won't pay a return is too stupid to hold a job; ever.
My wife’s job has brought her in contact with couple a few years younger than us, who made a living with puppets.
One of their sons decided to follow his parents, but he got a bs in entertainment and a masters in something just as phoney.
He owes big time for his student loans and has taken over his parents puppet business, which he could have had for at least $100,000 less than his student loans. If he had just taken a couple of accounting courses at the local community college and learned from his parents about how make money for puppets, he would be a lot happier.
I don’t know if it was photo shopped or based on reality.
We know so many unhappy young people 25-49, most sitll living with their parents with worthless instant unemployment degrees and in big debt for those worthless degrees.
Gen X’ers voted Reagan in. Your beef is with the Millennials.
Most Gen X’ers were not taken in by Barry’s “shuckin’ and jivin’”. Unfortunately, it looks like the Republicans may just snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
“Yep. I dithered around in an anthropology Ph.D. program for several years before I finally admitted that I had no real interest in glorifying Third World culture.”
Your reply brough a smile to my face and a grimace, not because of you but because we know of someone with a PHd in some worthless SE Asia anthropology.
He was a smart but lazy young man between the ages of our two sons. We knew his parents, hard working blue collar people.
They helped to finance that degree and of course he took student loans.
One day our sons and we had a discussion about him when he was working on his masters. I asked what was he going to do with a masters in a worthless degree.
Our cynic son, said watch him get his masters and then go for his PHd. I asked what would he do with his PHd?
Both sons said become a professor at the same college or another and get paid to teach the same worthless bs.
He got his PHd and is a tenured professor at the college where he got his BA and MS. His parents are still working to pay off his worthless education. Of course he has a salary which is more than those who have studied under him.
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