{"id":47255,"date":"2019-03-22T13:26:22","date_gmt":"2019-03-22T20:26:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=47255"},"modified":"2019-03-22T13:26:22","modified_gmt":"2019-03-22T20:26:22","slug":"student-loans-warping-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/student-loans-warping-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Student loans warping society"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019m often asked about the long term effects on our culture from the huge student loan scam. I don\u2019t have a crystal ball, so I have only conjecture, but a recent article from Buzzfeed<\/a> (bear with me, I\u2019ll be making corrections) tries to address this problem:<\/p>\n

Jen\u2019s story is like a lot<\/strong> of people\u2019s stories. She\u2019s 35 years old. She and her sister were the first in their family to go to college. She emerged from undergrad with $12,000 in debt, and even though she was making just $30,000 a year at her first job, she made her standard monthly loan payments on time. In 2008, when she was laid off into the depths of the economic crisis, she decided to do what so many other people did then: go back to school\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

So far so good for Buzzfeed, the above really is the typical story. Bottom line, students pay way too much for college degrees which financially reward far too little, hurting them greatly. A significant proportion of those students don\u2019t quite learn their lesson and go into grad school, utterly devastating their lives in exchange for an overpriced graduate degree which is no more useful than their overpriced undergraduate degree.<\/p>\n

The Buzzfeed piles on with their anecdote by giving Jen a stroke, but that\u2019s entirely unnecessary\u2026simply going to grade school sealed her fate, stroke or not, much as it\u2019s destroyed many of our citizens.<\/p>\n

Jen is one of more than 44 million Americans with student loans, and her current balance of $70,000 is just a tiny fraction of our collective $1.7 trillion debt load.<\/em><\/p>\n

The 44 million number is mostly correct; it\u2019s the official estimate, and I can forgive Buzzfeed for using it. Trouble is, that estimate comes from a strange accounting method, which doesn\u2019t count many students currently in college taking loan money, as having student loans, because the loans don\u2019t \u201cofficially\u201d count until the student leaves college. As around 70% of college graduates<\/a> (and, presumably, college dropouts) have loans, and there are around 20 million college students<\/a>, we could be looking at 60,000,000 people with student loans now\u2026that\u2019s close to 20% of the population.<\/p>\n

The weight of all that student loan debt is markedly different than the feeling of the weight of mortgage or credit card debt \u2014 after all, those borrowers can declare bankruptcy, an option unavailable to student loan borrowers.<\/em><\/p>\n

If 20% of the population had AIDS, cancer, or some other lifelong debilitating and inescapable disease, it\u2019d be major news. But somehow these lifelong loans just aren\u2019t very interesting to the mainstream media. Hmm.<\/p>\n

That Jen defaulted on her loans isn\u2019t uncommon, either \u2014 default rates are projected to hit 38% by 2023. Like Jen, most who default don\u2019t do so because they\u2019re lazy, or not out looking for work, but because the loan payment amounts are just too much. Nevertheless, much of the conversation around student loan debt still puts the onus on the borrower.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wow, that\u2019s a huge projection for defaults. Of course, the default won\u2019t save the borrowers, since the loan only gets larger when you default. People with cancer or AIDS are luckier, I guess, since they can at least die\u2014some student loans stay even after death<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Back when we had the sub-prime housing loan crisis, we eventually had a massive default which destroyed several very large and powerful banks, while other banks got multi-trillion dollar bailouts.<\/p>\n

Soon, we\u2019re going to have a massive student loan default. Maybe it, too, will be solved by bailouts, but I can\u2019t rule out a violent revolt\u202620% of the population is large enough for a civil war, and seeing as they\u2019d have little to lose, it\u2019s at least a possibility.<\/p>\n

\u201cA member of my family once said I deserved student loan debt because I chose the unrealistic field of history,\u201d one borrower told me.<\/em><\/p>\n

The above sentiment is quite common, but I feel far more pity than contempt for students trapped like this, and I\u2019m not a sweet person by nature. See, these kids were indoctrinated into going to college, indoctrination which started at around the 2nd grade (if not earlier), and becomes incredibly oppressive by the time they\u2019re leaving high school.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re told about the 23 genders, but never told about the perils of student loans. Heck, 28% of students with student loan debt don\u2019t even know it<\/a>…if they don\u2019t even know they have the debt, perhaps the government is justified in not counting the debt as debt. I don\u2019t agree, of course, since the microsecond the student steps off campus, degree or not, payments accrue.<\/p>\n

So, no, this isn\u2019t the student\u2019s fault. It\u2019s our higher education system\u2019s fault, especially since every accredited school (i.e., a school which can take student loan money) certifies in writing that they\u2019ll act with integrity\u2026even as they rip off and deceive students into taking on student loans.<\/p>\n

Now, there is a possibility of student loan forgiveness:<\/p>\n

The issue came into focus in fall 2018, when the Department of Education released information related to the first round of potential loan forgiveness. Out of 29,000 forgiveness applications that had been processed, more than 98% had been rejected.<\/em><\/p>\n

Buzzfeed it a bit off here, the rejection rate isn\u2019t 98%, 49 out of 50, it\u2019s more like 279 out of 280\u2026basically nobody qualifies<\/a>. Eh, Buzzfeed is close enough I guess. The whole forgiveness thing really is a joke:<\/p>\n

\u2026just how illogical and intractable the system remains. If you pay even one dollar more than your set income-based repayment, the payment doesn\u2019t count toward forgiveness. If you make the payment a day early, it doesn\u2019t count. If you make a payment on the one-day gap between switching from one public service job to the next, it doesn\u2019t count. If, for whatever reason, you cannot make a payment for one month, your loan will then go into forbearance.<\/em><\/p>\n

Now that we\u2019ve established that student loans are crushing a generation of Americans\u2026what\u2019s this going to do to our country?<\/p>\n

Next time around I\u2019ll talk about what Buzzfeed has to say.<\/p>\n

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m often asked about the long term effects on our culture from the huge student loan scam. I don\u2019t have a crystal ball, so I have only conjecture, but a recent article from Buzzfeed (bear with me, I\u2019ll be making corrections) tries to address this problem: Jen\u2019s story is like a lot of people\u2019s stories. […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":47258,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[12991],"coauthors":[11733],"class_list":["post-47255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-higher-education","tag-student-loans"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStudent loans warping society - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/student-loans-warping-society\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Student loans warping society - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I\u2019m often asked about the long term effects on our culture from the huge student loan scam. 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