Posted on 06/24/2014 5:59:04 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Life’s traditional milestones of marriage, home and children do not hold any currency for today’s millennials due to lack of cash.
Many young adults, facing a difficult job market, suffer from a failure to launch their lives and leave the safety of the family home. Many must continue to rely in some part on parents for financial support, according to the findings of a new survey.
“The majority of young adults are struggling to achieve financial security in their transition from college to adulthood,” according to the Arizona Pathways to Life Success for University Students (APLUS). It is an annual study that polls some 1,000 young people who are making the transition from college to post-graduate life.
The reason seems to be directly related to their financial well-being.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Exactly. I really think most anybody (I'm sure there are some very few hard luck exceptions) can get a degree with less than 15k in loans.
My son got $5k in grants and scholarships at Virginia Tech(in-state). He wanted to go to App State but I reminded him that he didn’t want to go badly enough to apply for scholarships.
Employers will Americans over the foreigners any day. The language/culture barrier is tremendous. There’s nothing like hearing your Indian programmer tell a client that his idea is “stupid”.
90% of college degrees are intrinsically worthless, or could be equivalently obtained by reading books.
Its not worth the investment, simply to impress an hr department. I discouraged my kids from going. My oldest decided to go, because she wants to be a teacher. So she’s commuting from home to a state college, and working her way through school. Shell finish her degrees with money in the bank.
I do think for any kind of professional job a person needs a cell phone and that cell phone should have the ability to get on the internet. Of course, there are varying plans. But imagine 20 years ago a person having a professional job without a home phone. Unlikely. And he'd have been labelled as weird by his peers. Obviously, having the latest video game is stupid if you don't have the money.
But I'm just not seeing the loser young people that others here are. I'm seeing hard working kids getting fed up with socialism. And I live in a very liberal area (Philadelphia area). Certainly, they lean more libertarian than conservative, but most of them would vote for a liberal over their dead bodies.
It is scary, some of them seem unable to cope. I had one remark about how we have three vehicles. I said we bought them all used and for cash. Still whining about the fact that I have one car and two trucks. I finally said I am nearly 50 years old and married and we both work full time, we don’t have a data plan, (still have flip phones). Etc.
A degree's not worth it just to impress somebody, but it may very well be required to get your foot in the door. Are your sons in the trades? Have they gone into business for themselves? I would agree in those cases paying for a degree may be foolish. However, there are lots of automatic full tuition scholarships based on SATs/ACT's and GPA's. See here: http://automaticfulltuition.yolasite.com/
the way to solve the loan bubble is to:
1. make student loans dischargable in bankruptcy
and
2. make universities liable for the debt.
student loans are a tax on future income.
It is a form of indentured servitude.
When my boys were ready to go out in the world, I told them that the furniture, cars, etc. they saw we owned, took years of hard work and thrift, and not to go crazy with "easy terms" they'd be offered in the future.
Thankfully, the talk sunk in - with a few small relapses. :-)
No one is saying they are bad kids. They are freaking clueless as to how to get along without all these gadgets and I am afraid for them.
The best, or worst, part of this, depending on how you look at it, is that the best schools are BY FAR the cheapest on a net basis. If your family income is under $100k, it is FREE to go to Harvard, Yale or Princeton, and very close to free to many of the other elite private schools — whereas East Podunk State University these days will easily put $20k a year in loans on the back of a kid and his parents with a 2.7 high school GPA and a very limited opportunity to get the kind of jobs that justify $90k in debt (interest accrues while studying on many loans). The most unconscionable though are the no-name private school across town from East Podunk State, where for no incremental value of East Podunk State they’ll make that loan $35k a year.
I’d have to disagree with both ideas. To allow the loans to be dischargeable would encourage immediate bankruptcy filings upon graduation Universities do not take out the loans, they offer a product. Students who are willing to pay big money for an art history degree deserve what they don’t get.
Call it what you will. My brother pays $27k a year for his son at Georgetown. Full tuition R&B is $54k a year. So maybe it’s a need based grant and not an academic scholarship. All I know is his great grades in HS helped...
Then don’t allow any debts to be discharged and bring back debtors prisons.
No need for that. Keep hacking away at the debt. Or allow a judgment to be entered. In NC judgments last for 10 years.
Borrowers sure don’t seem to be concerned when they get the money, but a lot of them don’t seem to think they ought to have to pay it back.
The same holds true for your brother and nephew - unless they're coming up with the 27k in cash each year, I'd say G'town's not worth it for them either. A kid who can get into Georgetown could easily have gotten a full ride to another school. On the other hand, if they've got the 27k, then they're using the variable tuition pricing scheme to their advantage and good for them.
Personally, I'd pin them down to see exactly how much, if any, of that aid is actually loans. The average indebted 2012 graduate of G'town had accumulated about 25k in loans. That's too much. Particularly if a kid is planning to go on to grad school. 40% of the kids at Georgetown qualified for financial aid. That's the same number who graduated with debt in their name. Don't know if it's the same kids. Additionally, there are 402 parents every year taking out Parent PLUS loans for their kid's Georgetown education. We don't know how many home equity loans or personal lines of credit have been tapped. And this at a school that claims to meet "full need." It's a racket and parents and kids need to snap out of it. We need to take the romance out of higher education. We can help by calling a kid's tuition discount at a prestigious school what it actually is - financial aid. It is not a merit scholarship in the traditional sense of a discount awarded for being among a given school's best and brightest.
It is what it is. My bro is paying. Not my business how. Both his college age sons also work 2 part time jobs each so they contribute. When they both graduate with degrees from Dartmouth and Gtown respectively, they’ll find good jobs. But like I said all along, they should have tried the service academies.
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