The good news is that a student will graduate from college. With a college degree, a younger person has a greater capability of shaping his career and life in general. The student has the opportunity to make more money. Advancements come easier when you have a college degree. Or so the story goes.
The fact is many college students are drowning in debt created by borrowing money to go to school. They borrowed the money out of necessity, to obtain a decent education. Without a college education, you then are stuck with a high school education, which for all intent and purpose is pretty useless in this modern age.
Kids borrow the money and graduate college, believing there will be jobs and opportunity. Instead, for the last number of years they have walked into a world where the jobs are limited, the economy in a meltdown, and where outsourcing to other countries has depleted the job market. Competition for jobs is fierce and the student debt keeps piling up. According to the Huffington Post , the average student will graduate $23,000 in debt. I believe that is a very conservative estimate. Having looked over the cost of college tuition recently, that’s about one year’s tuition in most public universities.
There are two kinds of student loans. The first is the Stafford or government loan. It is a good loan, but it has its limitations. Mainly, you can’t borrow all the money you need as a student. So, especially if you enroll in a private school, you take out private loans. From a bank. Which is guaranteed by the Federal government.
Fannie Mae and Sallie Mae employ some 35,000 persons. They are the middle men in the great bank loan debacle. They and the banks employ lobbyists to persuade congressman to do such things as deny students what’s left of the common consumer rights that most people enjoy. Students can not file bankruptcy as a means of walking away from their loans. Should they hit a bad patch, and many graduates have, then the interest builds, compounds, becomes outrageous and the bank can assess an additional 25% on the principal should the student have the tough luck to default.
It is probably the closest thing to indentured bondage we have seen in this country in quite awhile. The kind of slavery we cluck in anguish over, should it happen to immigrants who have their freedom held for ransom by the coyotes and others who smuggled them into this country for exorbitant prices. But when it happens to our kids, well hell, it’s just a matter of doing business. We just sell them down the river.
The student loan system is a disgrace. Or I should say the part where students are forced to borrow from private banks for the extra money they need. It preys upon the poor and middle class, the kids whose parents are either too poor or too strapped in a bad economy to pay for their tuition. Work your way through college? With college tuition as high as it is, this is hardly likely. If you could live, eat, and pay your tuition you would have the kind of job in the first place that wouldn’t require you to sacrifice it for a college diploma.
There is a reform bill proposed by Congress, but lobbyists are working hard to beat it down. The banks detest the fact that the loan money may go directly to the students without the banks taking their unfair share of the cut. So they can jack up the interest rates and bonus their executives for a job well done. So they can pay off persons in the legislature so they will not institute any real reform. It’s not bribery, of course. It is campaign contributions, a couple of dozen favors, and a job once you retire from the hallowed halls of Congress.
And kids starve. They struggle. They try to gain traction in an already tough and competitive world. They watched their jobs outsourced by another group of corporate interests who also lobby Congress so they can send American jobs overseas while still enjoying hefty tax cuts.
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This is an entire generation we are talking about, with additional generations to follow. This is our best and our brightest. And we are screwing them royally. Charging them a bunch for the opportunity to go to school and make something of themselves, and then holding their lives for ransom afterwords. It’s a new form of the old company store, where the company owns everything and the coal mine, including your ass.
We watch self-righteous legislators go on about how budgetary concerns are burdening and bankrupting our future generations. But we don’t hear much about the burden of student loans. Not more than a whisper. Never mind the fact that the poor kids in the land of opportunity, make that the new poor, the middle class, are disrupted at the starting gate from seizing that opportunity. Forget that we took away their consumer rights with the sole justification being that they are students.
Forget everything. Including the future.
