The student debt explosion: Higher education bubble threatens to add to nation’s economic woes

President Obama and members of Congress have spent so much that the federal debt is headed toward $16.4 trillion. Those lawmakers must be using budgetary skills they picked up in college, as undergrads around the nation are racking up red ink at a record pace. Student loan debt jumped $42 billion last quarter, the New York Federal Reserve reported last week, bringing the total owed to about $1 trillion.

That’s more than Americans owe on automobile loans or credit cards, and school bills have become so large that many have found themselves unable to pay. The official student loan delinquency rate hit 11 percent, which is higher than any other category of consumer debt. The official rate doesn’t include loans that are deferred or in their forbearance period, so the depth of the problem could be far greater.

Some want to foist responsibility for the situation onto taxpayers. Mr. Obama started the trend last year with an executive order limiting student loan repayments to 10 percent of discretionary income. Rep. Hansen Clarke, Michigan Democrat, is pushing his Student Loan Forgiveness Act, which would give even more breaks to borrowers. All this does is make the problem worse. The endless supply of taxpayer subsidies has fueled the rise in college tuition. On average, the cost of attending a university has outstripped inflation by 5 percent annually over the past decade. The Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey estimates federal student aid increased by 372 percent between 1985 and 2010, from just less than $30 billion to almost $140 billion. Most of the increase has come in the form of loans rather than grant money, which has contributed to the looming crisis.

The student loan hustle is just a way for educational institutions to guarantee income and growth for tenured professors.

Like the legislators, they tout the ‘value of a college education’ to students who aren’t nearly qualified nor really interested in traditional higher education studies.

Many won’t ever finish and those who do will find they have no job skills for a glutted market of graduates in similar situations.

Most of the students who enroll in so-called ‘soft’ studies like English and Education will strangle their financial futures with unbelievable total loans that according to congress (at this time) have to be repaid or face forced debits of their bank accounts or IRS refunds.

And this doesn’t even consider the real hustlers of the student market—the for-profit companies that sell worthless instruction on car mechanics, airplane mechanics and lvn or secretarilal skills.

You mean the for profits that Romney fronted?

I do agree with your sentiments. It is ironic that our state schools charge more for engineering tuition than for liberal arts tuition. The reason given is the more expensive instruction (losing track of the dollars that the engineering school brings in from grants).

I do wonder if more teaching candidates follow the dollars instead of teaching where we will get our next generation of teachers from. No doubt we are trying to force their wages down.

I got two masters degrees and all but thesis for another since 2000. Along the way I became an adjunct professor of writing.

During my years at the university I came across a lot of future and current teachers. I hate to say it, but the quality of those folks was mediocre at best and laughably bad at worst.

How about a history teacher, going for her Masters in history who asked the professor at the beginning of a course in WWII History: “Professor, you keep referring to WWII. Wouldn’t that mean there had to be a WWI?

Many of the undergraduates in the Education Department were terribly ignorant, almost illiterate. They would hire me or others to ‘tutor’ them when what they really expected was for us to write their papers for them. These are the people who are now teaching America’s children.

If the public knew about the fraud that the education lobby and education industry is perpetrating on them, they would puke at the huge expenditure in taxes that is foisted on them by the legislators.

After all, isn’t it the birthright of every American child to have a good education? Well, they aren’t getting a good education and every generation is simply being dumbed down by increasingly worse teachers. The downward spiral of our education system is only matched by the upward spiral of our outlays in taxes, futilely spent in the hope that the schools will improve.

When you read stories about how 30% of teachers in a school district can’t read or write English at the 8th grade level, you must believe it.

I have not come across those teachers in my school district. I have only come across one “bad” teacher in my interaction over 12 years and two children. The one “bad” teacher knew what to do - he was just lazy and focussed on sports and not the classroom (I Homeschooled my daughter in English for two years for that reason).
It does come down to you get what you pay for. I am amazed at the quality of some of the teachers even with the pay (for example a math/engineering teacher could make twice as much as my employer than he makes teaching my daughter). Folks like to discount English teachers, but they have probably the hardest job if they are doing their work well (giving feedback on lots of writing). Grading math and science problems is easy by comparison (note I am an engineer). Social Studies and Foreign Language teachers also have great value (I cringe when I hear some of my engineering coworkers badmouthing social studies teachers - some of the most important topics in society are discussed in those classes and good ones have lots of writing assignments as well).

Finally you have the teachers who have to deal with the unruly students that make learning difficult at best. At the end of the day that is the problem in my school district. My daughter’s engineering class is a zoo, and it is a shame because she really loves the topic and the teacher who is an engineer has a lot to teach.

If you don’t think the teachers in the average school system have a high percentage of incompetents, then where do you get your information? As a tech guy, I know you have to have empirical evidence for your opinions, right?

As far as teacher salaries go, they do pretty good these days on average, whether they are competent or not. Here’s a short primer on salaries from a site dedicated to teachers (alleducation.com) and they put a pretty rosy glow on teaching as a career:

“... the following states, which offer the highest annual average secondary teacher salaries:
New York – $71,820
Rhode Island – $70,430
Alaska – $69,730
New Jersey – $68,650
Connecticut – $66,870

(Note, these are averages. The all state average is around 50,000-60,000. Some school districts pay a lot better than the average)

TEACHER BENEFITS AND PERKS
A sometimes forgotten component of high school teacher salaries is the great benefits that teachers get for their hard work. Public secondary school teachers enjoy some of the most comprehensive benefits packages offered today. Good health and dental insurance as well as generous pension plans supplement the above-mentioned teacher salaries to comprise an attractive overall package.

In some areas, teacher shortages have districts vying for qualified candidates. These understaffed schools have been known to offer additional perks such as subsidized housing, continuing education credit and on-site childcare.

HOURLY SALARY COMPARISONS
Another factor to consider is the relatively short hours classroom teachers work in a typical year.
Secondary teachers work an average of over 500 hours less than typical full-time workers per year due to school breaks and vacation time, which means that you’ll earn about $10 more per hour than a typical year-round worker who brings in the same paycheck.”

To me, it was surprising that probably the worst pay in the educational industry is adjunct professors in college with Master’s Degrees on up. They only get hourly wages based on their actual course hours from $10-12 per hour on average. They don’t get paid for hours spent in preparation or grading papers. No benefits and no overtime. The colleges get away with it because the graduated MAs hope to move up in the system, not realizing at first that the tenure track to full-time professorship is very difficult. As soon as they make any noise about full-time employment the colleges let them go because there are literally thousands of new degree-holders out there willing to work for peanuts.

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