I wonder how many, because stats show college graduates are more likely to be employed and with higher incomes. Anecdotes we can all come up with, but in reality, I wonder what the percentage is?
ETA: The anecdotes I know from school and elsewhere don’t really surprise me. Many times they have other less desirable issues besides education - often personality and/or work ethic things. Others refuse to relocate to where the jobs are for what they went to school for. Not all jobs are available everywhere or where one wants to live.
There are probably specific majors and career paths where the cost of the education and credential is high, but the job and pay prospects are poor, or poor in comparison to the cost of the education and credential. Social work, as mentioned above, is probably such a major and career path.
This perfectly mobile, friction-free ideal worker thing is grand if you’re responsible for nobody in the world but yourself and you exist more or less as an island. This is far more likely to describe men than it is to describe women. If you have children, parents or siblings who need help, or anything else that requires community, then this does not describe you, and you’re not really all that free to take off.
There’s also a trope that didn’t exist two generations ago, which is “new in town.” You get people moving very readily to new towns and then finding nobody. They go to work, they go home. Work, home. Work, home. Work does not provide the kind of social environment that it once did, and in a new place full of adults trying to take care of more obligations than they can handle, it’s difficult to engage new people. So if you’ve already got a good social circle where you are, with people who know you well, there are real costs to moving unless you’re a very gregarious person.
These problems didn’t come up so much a couple generations ago because it was quite difficult to move far from home. There wasn’t an internet helping you rent an apartment, giving you the lay of the land, connecting you to faraway employers. If you were going far away, the odds that you already had people there were pretty good. I think the error is in thinking that people are economic chits.
Most people here know how credit works. I spent some time working for a Fixed Income Analytics group on Wall Street. The way we give out student loans needs to be returned to the way things were 30 or so years ago. Student loans worked fine back then.
As for canceling current student debt, the government deserves blame for rewriting laws to allow schools and private lenders to take advantage of naive students. The government, schools, lenders and students all need to feel the pain that comes from fixing the problem. It’s not fair to the students who took out those loans to have to shoulder all of the responsibility. It’s also not fair simply to cancel X amount of debt for everybody, since that means people who don’t need help paying off their debt get a break. Allowing people to file for bankruptcy means the people who have no hope in life due to debt can have a future. There’s no reason student debt should be treated differently than other kinds of debt.
There’s a lot of incentive not to do that kind of counting. There’s also a lot of intellectual sweatshop work that requires a college degree, pays low hourly, is gig-format, and goes nowhere. Colleges call these people “employed graduates working in their fields”.
Some local friends put together a microcredit group a few years ago, and among other people they lend money at no or very low interest to students to pay off high-interest student debt. They’ve yet to have anyone miss a payment. These people have no collateral.
This is similar to what @ucbalumnus mentioned above with certain fields and it’s part of why we need to fix education costs assuming we still want these jobs filled.
It’s totally different than those who have to take fast food, low pay factory, or retail jobs (the same jobs kids can get out of high school with no further education).
The pay may be similar. The educational cost is not - nor are those usually satisfying jobs for those capable of more advanced trades or academic jobs.
I’ve worked a lot of retail, also a lot of intellectual-sweatshop. Honestly, I think retail’s preferable. There’s nothing satisfying about working in isolation in a blind panic to meet an impossible deadline, never knowing when jobs will be dangled and which ones will actually be real, or competing with dozens or hundreds of multiple advanced degree holders for $12/work. In a store, at least you get the swing and flow of business, you talk to people, you’re part of the enterprise, and maybe you can make someone’s life a little better that day, or improve the business. You also get to go home at the end of it.
Back then you were able to discharge your student debt in bankruptcy. That was one of the reasons the government and banks were more responsible in how they loaned students money. It was a lot harder to get a loan if you wanted to use it for a less reputable institution such as a diploma mill or storefront “Institute of Cosmetology.” It also kept college costs down. After it became so easy to get college money, schools had every incentive to raise their costs of attendance, so they did.
Thanks for the clarification! I would add that the ability to discharge student debt in bankruptcy was removed from from the code circa 1976. I do agree that loans worked better because as @ucbalumnus points out, loans covered much more of the costs which were significantly less than today. However, there is still a limit of $27,000 which doesn’t seem so extreme as an amount of debt to repay.
And I absolutely agree that for loans should not be given to attend the type of for profit colleges/schools you reference.
Thank you! The amounts listed just don’t seem that unreasonable to me. And I find it curious that $27,000 in loans has given colleges carte blanche to raise tuition rates at such a steep pace. Wouldn’t the parent plus loans and private lenders be more at fault?
I guess another way to look at it is this: the up coming generations will be the ones paying for all this spending to fund education. They’ll be paying for the loan forgiveness, for the expanding budgets for all levels of education. And they’ll reap the supposed rewards. Seems like it might all work out the way it should.
Since the federal loan amounts for most undergraduates have not changed in over a decade (of course, declined in real terms based on CPI inflation), it is likely that the rise in undergraduate college costs since then has been due to other reasons, contrary to the common trope that it is all to be blamed on government student loans.
If the rise were loan-availability driven, but then these loans require loan qualification/income-evaluation/credit-evaluation/etc… But the average student loan debt seems to be mostly clustered around the federal loan limit, although northeastern states tend to have higher debt levels than western states, according to Interactive Map - The Institute for College Access & Success .
It is likely that there are other factors besides the commonly blamed loan availability that are behind the rapid rise in college costs.