There are only a few issues out there that I am overly passionate about. Among the highest on my list are student loans and how the great increase in student loans are slowly eroding the very concept of The American Dream. It’s frightening.
The team at USA Today has been on the front line of this issue since before there was any kickback scandal and before it became chic to cover student loans in the weekend papers. Which brings me to their latest offering, published online today.
Student loans sew seeds of economic ills
This story does a good job covering how the cost of going to school has increased while the available funding has only increased in the private sector – where money costs a good deal more than if it were borrowed from the government.
Many people who read about the current student loan crisis often view people in the article (like Ms. Kristin Cole in this article) as complainers or whiners. These folks often say that the people in the articles could have just as easily gone into the military or not gone to school. Well that’s a ton of bullshit. I can sympathize with Ms. Cole and her current plight. Remember, it was only a year and half ago or so that I was featured on the cover of USA Today about my own student loan debt.
The biggest problem that I faced after that article was printed was the problem of projection. People LOVE to project their situation on to your life if you’re covered in one of these articles. It’s pathetic, really. I scoured the internet after my article was printed and aside from the ignorant comments about the school I attended and whether or not I should have gotten a Masters Degree, the biggest discussion I saw was NOT about me and my situation, but rather about the people posting online and THEIR situations!
I got news for you folks, my story was on the front page for a lot more reasons that you read in my article! As I told the young woman who wrote the article, my case is becoming the new “classic” case of hyper-political correctness hurting people who have otherwise noble goals in life. In my case, I was a young, white, smart, middle-class, male who lived in the suburbs and had a list of leadership activities on my college applications a mile long. But because I was a young, white, smart, middle-class, male who lived in the suburbs there was literally no “free” money for me to attend college. Change any one of those variables and I would have gone to school for free; however if you’re in my position it is expected that you have family money to pay for your schooling.
Well that’s the biggest ton of bull crap that I’ve ever heard of. I come from a normal American family – not the Warbucks clan! But while I’m on that subject, let me say that I couldn’t be happier that I come from the family that I come from. Not only are all of my relatives awesome, but I’ve seen spoiled rich kids come to college (and in Grad School) who are so naive and so downright stupid that I would never want their money if being a moron came with it!
So to Ms. Cole in this article – I hear and understand your pains. Good luck!
Waah! Nobody forced you to sign the loan documents. That said, I do think lending companies victimize people in house loans as well as student loans.
BTW I worked fulltime through undergrad and got a free ride in grad school in planning, I was accepted to Bloustein with a stipend and free tuition but did not go. I am way whiter than you too! I was a nontraditional student and kicked but in undergrad. If you paid for grad school, you screwed up.
I spent one semester at Bloustein part-time (which I paid for) and 4 semesters with stipends and grants. I went to school full-time and worked a full-time and part-time job, too. Some people have different personal budgets than others which leads to variations in the way that money is spent. Congratulations on being way whiter, too, whatever that means.
And thank you for projecting your situation onto someone else’s situation. This is the biggest problem in the student loan discussion today. The world is filled with people that say, “I did this, so why couldn’t you?? Or some variation of that. Most of it is not meant maliciously – as your comments are certainly not meant that way. But it does nothing to further the conversation about the real problem – lack of financial education and a true middle-class that is cornered into absorbing massive debts to attain their educational goals.
All of the projection means nothing because in the end you have folks like Ms. Cole who is stuck in a financial rut. This is going to be the biggest financial story out there in the next 2 – 3 years. It has implications all over the country in all markets including housing and general consumer. Even the right-wingers will be forced to look at this issue as marriage rates will go down because of these debts.
Everyone should just watch and see – it’s coming!
Joe,
Thanks for the congrats! I am of NW European extraction which is why I say I am whiter. Also if you saw my two daughters you would see what I mean, blonde and blue eyed. I was just being silly but my point was nothing was being handed to me either. My family was mostly normal, but there were 6 kids, 4 of which have degrees 2 have advanced degrees. So no money from the rents.
The problem as I see it is people just want stuff now with everything; houses, cars, educations, clothes, vacations and big screen TVs. Ms Cole does not want to do law but that is what she went to school for and the reason it is so expensive. She is miserable because she makes bad choices.
Meanwhile, colleges of all types have jacked up tuitions and that is what makes them increasingly more difficult to finance as the article states. All of this while they are making it nearly impossible to get tenure tracked. (How is Monmouth’s relationships to its faculty BTW?)
As for projections, I want to say it is how creative you can be with financing that everyone who projects are really saying.
As for the big story, it is debt of all types that is the story to be told. Housing being the grandaddy of them all. Just wait till next year when the foreclosures pile up.
Have you checked out the cars I suggested?
I haven’t had a chance to go car shopping – busy schedule lately.
It could be that Ms. Cole made her choices based on bad or inaccurate information. These USA Today articles are notorious for not telling the person’s story, but rather the story the writer is looking to tell (which we should all expect).
Lord knows if I went through my entire story I would have one cohort of people looking to represent me in a variety of legal cases against my old high school, another cohort wanting me to be the destitute victim (not in my lifetime!), and another cohort telling me to shut up, among others.
The credit crunch is interesting to me as a lender and a guy who studies this stuff (read: nerd). I have some posts that I’m working on about the whole thing.
I don’t include myself enough in Monmouth’s working environment to be able to intelligently comment on their relationship to the faculty-at-large. All I can say is that the pay for an adjunct is a disgrace. Given the amount of time that I put into preparing that class, I was making more, per hour, as a price checker at PathMark when I was 19.
Are you a loan officer? If you consider yourself nerdy on the topic the best stuff I have seen on the web for that kind of infoporn is the Calcualted Risk blog and commenter/poster Tanta.
Eh, I’m sort of a loan officer for a nonprofit. Not student loans, though – commercial, real estate, and facility loans. And you’ll see that Calculated Risk is on my list of “Check Out These Sites” to the right. They have great information on there.
My bad! I have learned enough to be dangerous from that site.
Hi Joe!
I just found your site: A big set of Congrats for getting your degree. “Success to you, man!”
The danger of a loan is inversely proportional to how much research time you invest before you accept the money. Personally, I am out of the loan business: I buy with cash so I can give money away with no strings attached!
Check you my blog and see if the info is food for your thought …http://harryotto.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Harry