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Student Loan Debt Has Nearly Tripled (npr.org)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Recent college graduates who borrow are leaving school with an average of $34,000 in student loans. That's up from $20,000 just 10 years ago, according to a new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In that report, out this week, the New York Fed took a careful look at the relationship between debt and homeownership. For people aged 30 to 36, the analysis shows having any student debt significantly hurts your chances of buying a home, compared to college graduates with no debt. The cliche of "good debt" notwithstanding, the consequences of borrowing are real, and they are lasting. The report paints a mixed picture of how student borrowing has evolved over the last decade, since the financial crisis. There are some bright spots: For example, student loan defaults peaked five years ago and have declined ever since. And repayment seems to have slowed down among high-balance borrowers -- those who owe $75,000 or more. Meaning, after 10 years, they have paid down only one-quarter to one-third of what they owe.
34 / 20 = 3
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
the New York Fed took a careful look at the relationship between debt and homeownership. For people aged 30 to 36, the analysis shows having any student debt significantly hurts your chances of buying a home, compared to college graduates with no debt.
I'm glad public salaries were paid to come up with that study.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
When I went to community college in the early 1990's, I collected bottle and cans on campus to pay for next semester's classes and books because my parents (sixth-grade and high-school graduates) didn't believe in higher education. After doing that for a year, and avoiding a 98-year-old with a pointy stick who also collected recyclables, I got a job at the bookstore warehouse and worked 30 hours per week while taking 12 units.
My second tour through college after the dot com bust was paid for with a $3,000 tax credit that George W. signed into law after 9/11. I was working 60+ hours per week as a video game tester, teaching Sunday school and taking two classes per semester for five years. Made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0 GPA in my major.
The most successful college students I know have worked their way through college without racking student loans.
The problem is special case cared out for student loans - in US you can't discard them in bankruptcy. This should be ruled unconstitutional. If you could discard them in bankruptcy, lenders will be forced to re-introduce risk analysis back into the system. Some loans will be declared too risky based on costs and job prospects for graduates from specific program at a specific institution. This will put pressure on universities to keep costs in check as it will be again possible to price out 'consumers' out of the system.
I wouldn't exactly call the economy and policies a handout for the generation that sent their men to die in WWII.
You failed math.
$34,000 from $20,000 is only a 70% increase, not a 300% increase. In those 10 years, the value of $20,000 went up to $27,600, so it's really only a 25% increase.
A 25% increase in student loans during a recession is pretty well within expected range.
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Compare that a reasonable external rate of return. Is it Invest this tuition into an index fund and have your daughter attend community college. Sure, lifetime earnings potential is lower but your return on investment is likely more than offset that.
Then there is a question of quality of life. I am not aware of any $200K+ job that would give even a smidgen of consideration to work-life balance.
This proofs that not only prices went up, but quality lowered. If you adjust for quality the price increase is even higher.
I mean, this is getting ridiculous. When there's not a mistake, it's simply incomplete. And for this news, it's both at the same time.
"Student Loan Debt Has Nearly Tripled".....compared to what? I have to read the Text to find that is was compared to 10 years ago....which is also wrong.
Start earning your salary and work those Headline...and please stop the sensationalist too...
Elok
Mark Cuban noted that colleges increase tuition to the amount that students can borrow, and suggested if they capped the amount of loans, the universities would be forced to lower tuition or lose students.
It's an interesting idea, but in the end I'd guess the lower income families would get hurt.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Finance or medicine?
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
For Spring Break! You'll be paying for that vacation for a long time.
It sure seems like Slashdot is falling in love with misleading headlines because there seems to be a plenty of them lately. I don't know who or why is making them misleading but please, knock it off.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Baby boomers were born after WWII. A world war 2 vet now is in ther 90's
I suggest you look at the 45-70 year old crowd for fiscal itresponsibility. You know the same group that voted for Trump.
This group is under funded and spent not only the surpluses of their parents (ww2generatipn) but the future of their kids and grand kids
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
But to stay ahead of automation and cheap-labor-nations there is almost no choice. Non-degree jobs are stagnant or shrinking.
The only bright spot seems to be things like HVAC service and plumbing, but there's only so much room in those.
Table-ized A.I.
Yea, those people that vote the way I don't like should totally not be able to vote because I don't like their decision! Everyone should think like me because I am morally superior. I am fucking better than you.
Very accepting of your fellow man, aren't you?
< life story >
I went to a public/private university. Tuition was >40k$ / year. I was able to get 25k in grants and scholarships, but that left me and my parents with a 15k gap.
As my parents had shit credit, they couldn't help co-sign any loans. I had to get an extended family member to help.
After the first year, I couldn't afford it. Flat out.
So I dropped out after one year. No degree. Entered the minimum wage workforce making 8$/hr as a line cook. Worked my way up to Assistant Manager with... $9.50/hr...
Two years later, two shit cars later, and countless roommates later. I lost my job. My father was working as a Project Manager for a nationwide networking company. He helped me land a part time gig that paid 25$/hr but hours ranged from 0 to 30 a week depending on what projects he could help me get on.
But it took nearly 6 months before I was handed that part time gig... I also went to craigslist and worked landscaping when I could, making 10$/hr. However, during the next year, and the flaky hours, I was evicted from my apartment, and I defaulted on my student loans (yes I used all the deferred time (whatever it was really called) I could)... At this time the amount was ~10k.
Before I went into default, I knew exactly how to pay back my debt, I go to a website, enter in the amount, bank account info, done.
A couple years later I found a Software Developer position making ~45k/year. Trying to get my credit back on track, I went to research how to start paying back my debt. This was the most difficult process I could imagine. How can it be that hard to find out who you owe money to?!
A couple months later I finally figured it out, but saw that they charged enough fees for the amount go back up to the original 15k!!!! WHAT?!
Every step of the way in trying to pay back my debt, I stumble on some problem or another. Medical bill, car repair/inspection/registration, roommate leaving without notice leaving me with 2x rent.
</ life story >
I'm am incredibly happy that debtors prison is outlawed, but it seems they have just morphed it into this obscene beast that just eats anyone and everyone dumb enough to fall for this popular fallacy of graduating HS, going to college for 4 years, then landing a job that can help pay back ur debt and life style.
Now, before all you red-wing nuts say "Don't live beyond your means, get a better job, blah blah" I did all of that. Sold my car, rode public transport, lived in a 2 bdrm apartment with 6 other dudes, moved back in with my parents for a while, etc... I did everything I could to save every penny I could... still wasn't enough.
Student debt is today's slavery.
And you know what? Of my group of friends, I'm considered one of the more fortunate ones... Another friend of mine is over 100k$ in debt... And he's currently unemployed.
chapter 11 and 7 for student loans whould fix it. The banks and schools have no skin in the game.
The headline refers to total student loan debt. The summary applies to individuals. Total debt can triple even when individual debt "only" climbs 70%, when more people make stupid choices.
The same group that voted for Trump in the US and Brexit in Britain. In both cases you have a bunch of self-entitled arseholes who literally had the world handed to them on a golden platter and either are ignorant of the woes of the younger generations, or actively despise the younger generations.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Let's tell everyone they need college in order to be successful, but let's not be specific about what kind of college will get you success; after all a basket weaving degree is just as valuable as an engineering degree.
Let's tell them that college is so important that we'll make government-guaranteed loans available to be sure they can afford that critical degree.
We'll add to the mix the natural market reaction of increasing prices as more money is made available to pay for the product.
Then we can all act surprised as loan loads increase, the feel good degrees don't allow one to make payments causing the ability to pay those loans to decrease resulting in a requisite government-bailout for everyone who got a student loan to pay for a degree that has no value.
If you think a degree is going to have a positive economic value for you then you make the investment to get the degree. If that means working two jobs and taking 6 years to get a degree then so be it, you can make the economic decision to do that. If the economic numbers don't make sense for you then don't go to college to get a degree.
The whole story line about college being better for you economically is based on a mis-understood or mis-applied correlation: people who went to college earned more than people who didn't. That headline is based on the overall group. A more interesting question would be what is the net cost of college by degree-type. A student who spends $50,000 for a worthless degree will be overshadowed by someone who spends $50,000 for a degree ultimately worth millions. The average of the degrees is higher than those who have no college but the value is still close to zero for the person with the worthless degree and $50,000 in student loans.
That $50,000 degree worth millions isn't because of the degree. It's because of the application of the knowledge attained with the degree by a person driven enough to use that knowledge in a way that creates market value.
GI Bill wasn't a hand out
You can still get these hand outs by taking a trip to your local military recruitment office. Some jobs you'll get something like $50,000 for college
... I'm ready to enroll in part-time college and am torn hither and fro wether I should go to the local University (classic CS, bland curriculum, ugly wasted 80ies architecture campus, further away from where I work, PhD option, higher rank, Math 1 through 5 (scares the shit out of me)) or the local University of Applied Sciences (Media CS, neat Master Programs, easy curriculum, brand new posh campus with all the bells and whistles, more chicks on the faculty (so I hope :-) ), PhD option on the ropes (might change within the next few years), 'lesser' rank, Math 1 through 3 (scary too, but manageable)).
Mind you, aside from semester fees of ~280 Euros these options I'm toying with are free (as in beer) and those fees actually are a bargain because as an enrolled student you get public transport for free in the entire state (there actually is a little problem with students enrolling just for the benefits alone).
Bottom line:
It sucks to be a student in the US.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
when we started cutting all the federal funds. They warned about this in the 90s when the cuts started and everybody said it wouldn't matter because salaries would be so high to compensate. Meanwhile we've still got folks spreading the already disproved lies that it's all because of fancy dorms and rich teachers. Yeah, a few nasty little diploma mills were taking advantage of the loan programs. The last administration shut that down. Of course, I'm not expecting the current administration to be so student friendly...
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While looking at debt of college, ignores the reason for the high costs. Colleges have been raising tuition prices because they know you will qualify for the loan and the loan will be repaid. There is a reason the borrowing has sky rocketed up to 1.3 trillion dollars, colleges are making buckets of money.
An example of alternatives, WGU Governors college was created to provide degrees for working people at a real affordable cost. Most people can buy a 40K car on a 6 year loan, but a 400k school loan, thats stupidly expensive.
The running joke is colleges are now just hedge funds with a college attached. And the money isn't used to lower tuition.
Selling free college is a scam the universities want, they think they will get paid at the same high price, just moving the cost to the government. (aka us the tax payers....)
I didn't even mention the money the sports teams are making also.
Not everybody is cut out for management either. I should know, I'm one. Thus, crawl-up-the-ladder also has limits to many.
Table-ized A.I.
And yet the argument we hear as automation is set to take over even more jobs is that people need to seek better educations. So which is it? Should people just avoid advanced education and hope the robots don't take over their low-skilled job next, or should they seek advanced education so they can maintain full employment even when the robots come?
It strikes me that a lot of people, like you, just sort of automatically regurgitate certain popular talking points, talking points that very likely have absolutely no relationship with reality. I call it "talkradioitis", this notion that some windbag on the AM dial or on Fox or CNN actually has, or even actually cares, whether the memes they're trying to get out there represent any kind of objective reality.
The fact is that the number of high-paid low skilled jobs have been shrinking for a few decades now, and they're not coming back, so if you think you're going to enter or remain in the middle class without some sort of higher education, then you are very a much fucking idiot, and if you're telling your kids or anyone else that they can just coast along and the likes of Donald Trump will take care of them, then you're something far worse than a fucking idiot.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
and how many of them served in Vietnam and paid with the GI Bill? How about ROTC? Boomers i've met who went to college also worked and lived in rat infested apartments, worked full time and ate scraps and didn't get to party like kids today
Indeed. My dad (born in '43) was able to pay for a Harvard master's degree in the 60's by selling hotdogs... and he's made it abundantly clear that he takes full credit (and then some) for the feat. Good fucking luck achieving that today...
Then we are doomed. Just like I was never going to be a quarterback, the double digit IQ person is not going to get thru school (unless they are a quarterback taking special classes like North Carolina has).
Are you high? I saw a report the other day that there is a massive shortage of labor in the construction industry, specifically heavy equipment operators (excavators, backhoes, forklifts, etc). This shortage is estimated to be around 500,000 jobs. As a general rule, these are jobs that pay very well. Now, by very well, I do mean "very well for blue collar". With overtime and whatnot, you can easily do $100K/year in California as a heavy equipment operator. That's not bad, and you don't need a 4 year degree to do it. You can provide for a family and send your kids to college on $100K/year. Education is good. Knowledge is good. But the lie we have all been sold is "Education at any cost is good". No.. No it isn't. Driving yourself into debt for 30 years is not good! Part of the problem we have now is that most young people seem to be allergic to any kind of manual labor. They don't want to invest the sweat equity to get to the upper levels. I have a close friend who works for the local electric company. For 5 years, as an apprentice, he worked his ass off. He was the "bitch". He did the dirtiest jobs, he was the go-for. The pay sucked. The hours were long. But, once that 5 year apprenticeship was over and he made journeyman, his pay shot up to $45/hour and with overtime he was rolling in money. He made journeyman right before the 2007 fires here in California. During the fires, he was "at work" for 24 hours a day. 8 hours on, 8 off, 8 on, 8 off..... He did this for 3 months. In those three months he made $60,000 (take home) (double/triple time, hazardous pay, etc all factored in). He used that money to buy his first house. The point is, there are jobs out there that pay very well, and don't require you do bury yourself in debt. They just require determination and sweat.
you really think SS is going to go broke?
True to a point - but we are seeing semi-skilled manual jobs increase in pay. HVAC tech's and electricians for example are making quite good wages in most areas of the country. These are "hands on" gigs that can't be automated and don't require a 6 figure student loan. Law enforcement and firefighters make $100k on the West cost and come with retirement in your 50's with a pension. That's not bad.
About the only way you're going to make it through a masters degree these days without a wealthy parent or accruing vast debts is to sell a wiener alright, but not one in a bun, and sadly there are a number of students out there that have turned to the sex trade as a means of keeping themselves out of debt.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's overpriced, you can learn more on your own, and a degree does not make you any more hireable than no degree. There are TONS of degree holders working at walmart or flipping burgers. Hell my wife with her BSA can not get more than $13 an hour because women dont deserve male pay levels.
Do not go to college, go to a trade school or join a journeyman program and get a real education.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm not saying there aren't low-skilled categories of employment that still pay well. Certainly there are, but in some cases (as with firefighters, for instance), there are other pretty challenges prerequisites that are likely going to eliminate a lot potential applicants. And while there will always be jobs, at least in the next several decades, where automation won't intrude, that pool of jobs will shrink, and each of those career paths has its own barriers are requirements, if nothing more than availability of jobs, that will not make them the sort of universal low skilled career paths that manufacturing once represented.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yep. Ignorant. Couldn't have valid, differing opinions.. no. The youth are the new fascists, agree or be punched in the face and have your shit lit on fire. Ahh, progress.
Tuition prices are not tied to inflation or any other real economic index. Rises in tuition have been shown to be directly related to one thing: the availability of student loans. So when the government makes more student loans available they are screwing all students, those expecting to go through school by taking out loans and even those saving and trying to work hard to pay their own way (which becomes harder and harder to do as tuition costs skyrocket).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
So wages have been stagnant vs inflation for decades but somehow you think that students coming out of school make more money now?
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
There's two key issues with those kinds of jobs. For one, they are very recession-sensitive because construction is recession-sensitive. Plus, it takes a fair amount of training and practice to become proficient to operate heavy equipment that could be dangerous if used wrong.
But there are probably roughly 5 other people competing for that one job. It's a stress-survival contest. "I worked 4 asses off, you only worked 3 off, neener neener!" Thus, the solution doesn't scale. Sure, education is no guarantee either, but it's usually better than 1 in 5.
I don't dispute it does happen. But it's hard to know up front how successful one will be going that route. Statistically, a degree matters per life earning power.
Table-ized A.I.
There are a tremendous amount of crap degrees. Quoting Mike Rowe "People come out of College with a 4 year degree in basket weaving and 100K in debt, then wonder why they can't get a job." People have been duped.
People have been told that any degree is a leg up on a High School degree, which may have been true 30 years. Then Schools decided to expand the number of degrees to be sure that any attendee, even those that didn't really try, could still get a degree.
Banker: I see you have lots of college debt, which will make a mortgage difficult. How are the job prospects for a Gender Studies major?
Graduate: Well, I'm working as a retail clerk at a store while I wait for my big break in a massive company as an EO officer.
Banker: How about you come back after your debt is down or you have that great job.Graduate: But I have a degree!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Because the Babyboomers weren't out shouting and protesting in their day. Of course they were, but in their day, college and university was a helluva lot cheaper.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When I went to school a long time ago, I knew a lot of people who would sign up for the absolute maximum amount of loans they could -- way more than tuition costs. The government would pay the university directly, and students would get the extra balance back in a check (this was the mid-90s, we still had checks back then. :-) ) a couple weeks into the semester. Said students would then turn around and buy cars, booze, expensive apartment rents, etc. and just run up the tab their whole time there. I remember on "disbursement day" seeing lines out the door at the student accounts office waiting for their money.
Yes, tuition is stupid expensive now, and you can't swing it with a summer job anymore. But, how many students are borrowing the max, and using it to live large? I'm definitely saving as much as I can for my kids' educations so they don't have to go through the whole debt millstone. I graduated with a relatively small amount of debt and it was still a drag on my income starting out. Crippling? No, but I certainly wasn't able to save much before I got my first few raises.
Everyone loves to say that not everyone needs college, and I do think that's true. We need more trade guild style apprenticeships to feed the skilled labor pipeline. But for those who are going to end up in more involved fields, I still think college is a good way to gain the maturity and self-reliance you need in a controlled environment. If every low-skill job is going to be automated, then you'd better be on the side doing the automating or else life is going to be miserable. Do I use anything I studied in college directly for work? Not really, I'm in IT and studied chemistry. But, I did learn how to tackle a brand new problem, deal with crappy bureaucracy and unfair insider/office politics, and gained the ability to stick to a task and learn new things fast. Those are skills any employer should be looking for, not JavaScript Framework of the Month, but the ability to learn 5 of them in a year.
The Babyboomers never dealt with world wars or Depressions. Their parents did.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
My daughter's BS in Mathematics will cost me about $18K. Add another $12-16K to get her PhD. (All of which I am so far able to pay for in cash)
How on earth does the average student end up owing $34K at the end of 4 years?
Also, how on earth does a college graduate not have most of that $34K paid off in 10 years? Come on you guys, it's not THAT hard to pay off debt. All it takes is a reasonable job and the willingness to knuckle down and forego indulging oneself with unnecessary costs. Did you get some worthless degree and pay though the nose for it? If so, your lack of forethought does not mean someone else should be responsible for bailing you out and you need to grab your bootstraps and get busy...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If she's 25, it's not medicine. Residents (which even wunderkinder would be at that age, in the US) make around $50k/year.
Hmmm. I guess you forgot that now almost anyone can go to college even if they can barely read and write and consider 2+2 to be advanced mathematics.
Bring back admission standards (which would mean less students in university) and the costs would drop. Students who need remedial help should get it - but not in a 4 year college. Costs would drop.
Also drop the comparative literature courses and assorted basketweaving classes. You do realize all those gender studies programs cost money.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Do you know what the word "literally" means? How big was this golden platter that the self-entitled arseholes were handed? Where did all the gold come from? If the platter was large enough to hold the world it must have contained a lot of gold. Perhaps we could sell this platter and fund a program to forgive student loans. Do you know where the platter is currently stored?
Enigma
Oh, excuse me. I missed the Vietnam war and the Cold War. It was a different time with different challenges. No generation gets a picture perfect setting for life. Life is unfair and how you deal with it is what matters not the lame excuse you can come up with to blame prior generations.
If that is the only response then to me that makes millennials sound too spoiled and selfish to understand what they have and too resentful to appreciate the challenges and triumphs of a different time.
Every objective measure is markedly better.
Wages, job availability for that matter, property prices, the same goddamn college debt this thread is about that you casually hand-wave away?
Clearly you're either far too wealthy to understand what most Gen. Y'ers are going through, or you're simply a baby boomer in disguise.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Yea, those people that vote the way I don't like should totally not be able to vote because I don't like their decision!
Aren't they the ones gerrymandering your voting districts and generally screw up with people's ability to vote for the very same reasons?
Ezekiel 23:20
What about the newspaper? ;)
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm not sure that participation in this military event is somehow meaningfully related to the judgment of people who had little say in said participation, but students still work their asses off and eat scraps even today. Regarding not partying, well, there's always a portion of the population that doesn't do that, in every period of history.
Ezekiel 23:20
Given that profit for business owners in a capitalism based economy is derived from workers spending money on those goods and services.
At what point does automation ROI inverse as displacing human workers reduces potential consumer/customer pools leading to not enough people being able consume?
Going far enough down this road, capitalism stops working. Socialism doesn't work either at that point because the few left with resources (aka money) are really good at hiding it and not paying taxes.
What's left? And how far are we from those tipping points?
I mean if lenders want a virtual guarantee of repayment ok, I can see arguments for why student loans are a somewhat special case... but then with that needs to come minimal interest. I'm talking like half a point, maybe 1 point, over the federal discount rate. You want a government enforced lifetime repayment guarantee fine, but you get a government enforced minimal rate of return for it.
If they aren't ok with that, they are always free to lend normally at whatever rate they choose, but subject to normal bankruptcy laws.
They way it is now though is BS.
Also, it isn't as though universities can just lower tuitions infinitely. There's waste and overspending to be sure, but then there is in everything, expecting perfect efficiency is foolish. However there are just a lot of costs. It is expensive to run something like a university, particularly if you want good people. I mean if you have someone who has a PhD in a desirable discipline like engineering or law or chemistry, and are talented researchers, well they have a lot of career options. You can't say "Ya we'll pay you $30k/year, that should do right?" There's tons of other costs like buildings, computers, etc, etc.
Someone has to pay. In the past, a lot of it was paid with tax dollars for public schools, however that has been a real, real popular source for state legislatures to cut. There are public universities with less than 20% of their budget coming from public funds. Well the money has to come from somewhere, so an increase in tuition it is.
You can't say "just make cuts" because cuts are going to have an effect. You can cut quantity, like reducing the amount of faculty, staff, and facilities in which case you can simply take less students, or you can cut quality, like cutting salaries (which leads to the best people leaving), cutting building maintenance, cutting lab supplies, and so on which leads to lesser quality education. However you can't demand that cuts be made but no difference manifest.
The problem is that Babyboomers are quick to blame millennials for being coddled, when Babyboomers were the recipients of probably the single largest wealth transfer in human history. So spare me the whole "I knew a guy who fought in Vietnam and sometimes I felt a little spooked about Brezhnev" line. The fact was that an unskilled Babyboomer could literally walk into a high paying unskilled job, with benefits and a big fat pension at the end of it, as well as relatively cheap education and housing to boot. That doesn't exist anymore, and the only thing Babyboomers can say is to pretend they're like their fathers and grandfathers, who did have to work their fucking asses off for relatively low pay.
Babyboomers are the luckiest human beings to have ever lived, and trying to retcon difficulty into their coddled lives beggars belief.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You are bad at math and erading comprehension
From the article: "in the absence of more targeted grant or scholarship programs, more people are taking out student loans, and they are borrowing more. All that borrowing adds up to a total of $1.3 trillion, nearly triple what it was a decade ago."
The per-person debt is only up by about 70% (not 2.4%, I have no idea how you managed that number) but the TOTAL debt held by all people has tripled over ten years according to the article.
Making easy money for bankers!
I think I may have been among the last few who was able to put themselves through college working a shitty menial job. Finished my BS back in 2000 and paid for it all myself working at a gas station and later at U-Haul. At the gas station I started working there in high school and was an assistant manager while in college then switched over to U-Haul because it paid better, went from $13.50/hr to $15/hr,. the only reason I got more I could install hitches and fill propane and a lot of people lack the basic mechanical knowledge or the safety sense. Since then college costs have gone up close to 4x and I could probably make the same amount now working those jobs but in nominal, not inflation adjusted, dollars so I can understand people not being able to afford to put themselves through college.
Time to offend someone
back in the late 90s we cut the massive Federal subsidies they were getting. Federal grant money was what made public universities affordable. When that got cut they shot up in price. There's an article on 538 I've linked to elsewhere to prove this.
Keep in mind none of this is true for private for profit Universities. Those guys were and always will be a bunch of crooks taking advantage of desperate kids who couldn't make the cut into public school. That's what makes the lie that rising costs are due to evil schools so insidious. It's a lie with just a little itty bit of truth as long as you ignore the public schools that are actually teaching kids. And as we all know the best kind of lie is one with a little bit of truth mixed in somewheres.
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I think it was stolen out of a museum in Germany last week.
Time to offend someone
Wages, job availability for that matter,
Wages are down for a number of reasons that we readily see on /.. Such as automation, globalization, immigration, etc. There are a number of policies that have been tried some successful some not. No generation gets a picture perfect setting for life. Complaining because someone else had it better is not a good idea to fix your problems.
property prices
Vote with your feet. The US is a very big place.
college debt
And that college debt increased the availability of college education. With increased demand you have an increased supply. Yes, deregulation made it so lenders do not bear the risks and all risk is put on the students but that means more responsibility in the choices a student makes. If you get a degree that is over priced and under valued, you shouldn't blame boomers for getting that degree.
Forgive me if I sound callous, but I started college in 2005. The same year the student loan industry was deregulated. No one knew exactly what would happen with that policy change and "get a college education or else burger flipper" was the mantra. I still have 30k in student loan debt from a variety of predatory practices that I was too young and care and too naive to understand. All the shit from the studies and reports about how bad student loans are or how bad diploma mills are are because of those first few classes that were the test subjects like me. I was apart of that and everyone else learned from those first few years that "college is overpriced, not for everyone, don't take student loans out, don't go to University of Phoenix". My only saving grace was getting a degree in STEM.
I don't like talking about my personal experience online because it doesn't matter to any argument but its personal for me (losing my job and having Sally Mae ask me how much money is in my account and that I should beg my family to pay off interest accrued that month isn't a happy moment for me). I would love to just hand wave it away but even after all that I still don't think college should be free.
your far too wealthy to understand what most Gen. Y'ers
lol, tell that to my bank account because it isn't what you think it is. My liability far FAR exceeds my assets. Only recently have I had some financial freedom because I have been adamant about paying off my debt because I understood I have no financial future with student loans. Not even Social Security or 401k retirement.
I am where I am because of choices I made and because my father taught me valuable lessons in life.
baby boomer in disguise.
Thanks. I'll take that as a compliment because of the respect I have for my parents.
the colleges haven't raised their costs. We pulled the federal funds they were using to subsidize tuition. All you'll see if you let those loans discharge in bankruptcy is raising interest rates. The kids'll still pay them too because these days without a college degree or a lot of luck/connections you're spending the rest of your life at Walmart.
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to cover the defaults. You're basically unemployable without a degree these days thanks to all the oursourcing, H1-Bs, etc. They know this. If you're in the middle of a desert selling water you can bloody damn well charge what you want.
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Yes, but not for the group you think.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You know the claim that a student could pay for an ivy league degree back then with a minimum wage job has been proven to be a complete lie? Utter bullshit.
Repeating it as a personal anecdote doesn't make it any more true.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Well, did they also account for inflation? one dollar now is less worth than it was 10 years ago..
Bogus claim. Did you see the multiple stories here about California outsourcing their IT workers? That's a state run system. Here in New England, we have people like Liz Warren making several hundred grand to teach one college course. She's no republican, not a native American either but that's a different rant. UMass for some time had one of the Bulger brothers in charge, it's ripe with patronage and back room dealing. IMO, the government shouldn't be competing with industry, and if private schools can be successful on their own, the government shouldn't get in their way.
Part of the problem with education is that loans have traditionally been easy to come by to the point where no one considers the overall cost. People pick their favorite location and party school and other considerations are secondary. You may not like what the republicans are up to, but people need to be aware of the costs of what they're doing. It's not something you should ignore. People complain they're in dire financial shape after college but still curse at republicans for trying to do something about it.
This is somewhat like the mortgage debacle we had where people would sign for mortgages they could never possibly pay, but because of government backing with Frannie and Freddie, the banks had no reason not to offer impossible loans because they had no risk. Readily available loans lead colleges to do something similar, they can charge anything because students aren't thinking about cost. Well, that's changing. Once people become cost aware, the market should drive colleges to be more affordable, so that they're more marketable. The ivys will likely stay expensive because there's a scarcity problem there. Nothing is going to change that.
(3) Paid with fresh printed money.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
My mother worked at jack-in-the-box to pay for her college tuition. Yeah that's right, a minimum wage job was able to pay for a bachelors degree in 1970ish. My grandparents stuffed extra cash under a mattress for a year and then had enough money to buy a house. NOTE: Grandpa was not rich, worked construction at an oil company.
The government federally insures/guarantees housing loans and ~10 years later houses are too expensive to pay for by saving up for a year. About another 10 years later and we have a massive crash in the housing market culminating in the year 2008, the banks got bailed out and many ordinary americans lost their house and where kicked to the street.
The government federally insures/guarantees student loans and ~10 years later tuition is too expensive to pay for with a minimum wage job. About 10 years later we should expect a crash in the student loan market. How do you think the government will react to the banks, federally-funded colleges and students after seeing what they did in the housing crises?
The future doesn't look bright. Hopefully we can all learn our lesson: The Government federally insuring/guaranteeing loans almost always causes terrible market distortions and should almost never be done
Nope it will sit at about that 75% for ever because that is about what it takes in per year compared to what it pays out. Also the SS trust fund runs out in 2034 but stops taking in more than it receives around 2020 (although a few years ago it paid out more than it took it). You can read page 6 of the annual trustees report and find out the highlights.
Time to offend someone
Nationalism kept America strong enough to forge those golden platters to serve up the future to our country's children. Globalism is shipping all of those platters overseas or into the vaults of the already wealthy.
I can see the rationale for the people voting for their own raises. When you put the American worker in direct competition with every other worker in the world and engineer in to the system job instability and fear, the results are predictable. It seems many would prefer, nay, demand that the American worker to cower in fear of their government and their client corporations, hunkering down out of indecision and paralyzed by survival mode programming, completely abased and submissive to the whims of the government and those corporations. The recent votes in the US and GB show that there is a pressure release valve that circumvents the previously mentioned engineered worker domination scheme.
Not that I agree with electing a guy like Trump, but when you give people a choice between cutting their own throats and electing a mad man, the mad man will win every time. Ironic that you condemn the people who were given everything for wanting to go back to a system that gives people the ability to provide for their future generations, rather than spend everything they have to just survive.
Well maybe not ironic, maybe its just that you have different motives.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Yes and get off my lawn you kids. Damn kids and their rock n roll. This new generation will be the end! (tm).
Every parent wants their kids to have a better life. When does that ideal reach a point where that cannot be achieved wholesale without destruction to the environment? What cost are you willing to pay to get yours?
Largest wealth transfer in human history? Stop the hyperbole and stop the collective guilt. I am responsible for me and my actions.
unskilled Babyboomer could literally walk into a high paying unskilled job
So what? The global economy is more competitive. What is true for some is not true for others. That is not an excuse to complain about being the most well off and most spoiled generation in history.
their fathers and grandfathers, who did have to work their fucking asses
Hard work is a good life lesson. I learned a lot of good life lessons from my father that resulted in my relative success (honestly not that successful just enough to pay off student loans and have a mortgage). But I don't live in an expensive city or state so is affordable.
Babyboomers are the luckiest human beings
You are too resentful to see anything clearly. Stop blaming and resenting others for their success or luck when you have opportunity and freedom to change your circumstances.
Every objective measure is markedly better.
On the other hand, reality.
Then the summary on /. is wrong. Either way, it's the wrong conclusion to make. The average student debt increased 25% while 300% more people went to colleges.
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First, the definition of "college" has changed. It used to mean a 2-4 year, brick-and-mortar school for obtaining a bachelor's degree, master's degree, or doctorate. Now, it effectively means that any institution *or company* with an accreditation giving classes for people outside of the K-12 system. Your profit-profit, distance learning companies have facilitated a massive portion of this debt and provided a proportionally small ability for the debtors to actually pay the debt off.
Second, and happily, more people are actually going to college, so with any amount of individual debt, the numerical increase in students will increase the amount of total debt.
Third, prior to the recession of the mid-2000s, major universities saw themselves as competing for undergraduate students. Why? Because those students can bring in an almost-unlimited amount of Federal student loan money. My own university leased out massive amounts of land to a company to build beautiful (read: expensive) student housing to attract more and more undergraduates instead of historically standard (read: sufficient and cheap) student housing. So, colleges and universities expanded because they had a new influx of students and the government was willing to lend them whatever amount necessary for their education. And prices went up... QUICK.
In my first year at a major public research university in California in 2000, my annual tuition and fees cost $4,057. (That doesn't include things like books, housing, transportation, etc.) The cost in 1996 was $4,050. When I graduated, the annual tuition and fees and increased to $7,475-- an 84% increase in just a few years. This year, at the very same campus, tuition and fees cost $15,166 per year. That's almost a 375% increase over 17 years and it has everything to do with the unlimited access to federal student loans.
Lastly, consider that my numbers are just for tuition and fees. Housing costs skyrocketed in the same time. As did the cost of textbooks as well as has (for better or worse) the standard of living which includes smartphones and data plans.
For people aged 30 to 36, the analysis shows having any student debt significantly hurts your chances of buying a home
If you still have student debt 10 years after you graduated I wouldn't give you money for a house either.
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Tell me more about crime rates. Or threat of nuclear war. Or removal of lead from our environment. Or longer life expectancy. Or lower infant mortality. Or better access to more advanced health care. Or lower poverty rates. Or high education rates.
The only uncertainty is the economy and that has always been true for every generation not embroiled in existential war. Like the 70's uncertainty of stagflation. Or the oil shock. Or. or. or. The actors are different but the stage is the same.
What is not better that hasn't been true for any other previous generation?
This toxic lot reminds me why I moved to Australia. Here, uni repayments are affordably deducted only after the graduate starts earning over 60k a year. And there's no interest load.
Damn straight. I try to do things I'm not good at in my off-work time.
A couple of years ago, we had a presentation from HR about the career paths they were designing for software developers. I raised my hand and asked about career paths for people who never ever wanted to go into management. She said they'd work on that. Haven't seen anything since.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Hard work with low skills is doubtless just great. What a pity there are a lot less opportunities for that nowadays.
And I'm not resentful for me. I've got a good job. It's my kids who are being fucked over, and being told by assholes on the Internet "You millennials are all lazy whiners, now fuck off and give me my cheap health care!"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"give me my cheap health care"
Does that mean you oppose Obamacare? After all, it is funded by student loan debt interest and young healthy individuals.
I would have more sympathy if millennials weren't going around burning "free speech" signs on university campus bitching about how expensive university and how oppressed they are because someone in STEM makes more money.
I am a millennial and no generalization like that bother me because it doesn't apply to me. If your kids aren't lazy whiners and they are trying to better themselves by taking advantage of the opportunities available to them, they and you shouldn't care what the generalization is either.
Because all the millennials are doing that! YEssirree, every last one of them.
And my view on US health care is that the only way to deliver what everyone obviously wants is single payer.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Harvard has a good Financial Aid Program https://college.harvard.edu/fi...
oh right and genration X spent a decade in iraq, only to spend another decade in iraq. Vietnam was quick by comparison.
Also the average baby boomer could raise a family on just one income. now you need two and sometimes two +
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The students have to pay for the half billion Dollar football stadiums where they have a 12 person coaching staff that each gets at least a million a year. College athletics is the biggest money waster for colleges....and the fact that expenses for administration grew 300% the past decade while expenses for academia were flat or declining. Tuition pays for those who cannot speak in complete sentences, but look like fridge and can throw a ball far. And for those who did not get a degree, but got a job that makes getting a degree as expensive as possible. To put it bluntly, fire all the fancy coaches and ditch half of the administrative staff. Cuts tuition in half right there!
Maybe you shouldn't have gone to college in the first place, or, perhaps instead of going after a degree, that, pays 30-40 thousand dollars a year, which, when you were living off mommy and daddy sounded good, until you moved out on your own and have to put up with rent, car, food, expenses...you should have gone after a degree with a bigger potential, or gone to a 2 year trade school, or, SAVED UP the money instead of going INTO DEBT! Other than taxpayers who will probably be on the hook for this disaster, I have no pity on these idiots who go into HUGE debt, just to go to "big college". The media et al, gets all bent out of shape about "big oil", "big agriculture", "big pharma" but they OVERLOOK one of the biggest of the "bigs"....UNIVERSITIES. College presidents, deans, coaches making hundreds of thousands, if not MILLIONS of dollars a year, plus bonuses, and what not. Some professors don't even work a full week!
yes... #notall. But anti-liberal/anti-west is a common theme with younger students in university across the west. remember #notall the next time you bemoan any group, ya? Like your troll post of demographic bemoanment which started this as you described people that voted differently than you as a "bunch of self-entitled arseholes". #notall.
You can argue a better system all day but considering what you said was: "now fuck off and give me my cheap health care!" when Obamacare placed much of the financial burden on young people I find rich. Obama was supported by lots o young people as was his wannabe-successor. Don't bitch about shooting yourself in the foot.
Yes, it has been tradition that the children have a better future than their parents and millennials are the first to not get that. There are a lot of economic reasons for that beyond college being expensive.
People acting in their self interest is not a bad thing. Every generation has their own challenges to overcome. Bemoaning another generation is not how you overcome your challenges of your time.
Why are you so desperately trying to blame the plight of the younger generation on environmental issues?
There is a cost to everything and a lot of historical economic power was externalized to the environment. There will always be a cost with any source of energy or resource commoditization.
Probably legit for all of US history though. I think he's talking about the New Deal, the economic mobilization for WWII, and the top marginal tax brackets being north of 70% to help pay for it. All that happened during the greatest generation and they beat their depression and whooped the nazis. Loooots of money moved around, the "wealth transfer" he's talking about. That, and since all the previous great powers had the shit kicked out of them, helped America rise to the status of super-power. Times were good and prosperous. It set the stage for the Baby Boomers. That's the world you grew up in and inherited. Times were also pretty good when America became the sole super-power after the collapse of the soviets. That's my childhood. Wish that had lasted, but workers just aren't needed in the new economy. Not highschool grads anyway like when you were 18.
How old do you think I am? Hint: am millennial.
I don't know specifically what he is talking about but I will address what you say and not speculate on MightyMartians thoughts however fun that maybe. Yes, war happened and to the victor go the spoils. Those spoils did propel the US to be a superpower. So what? How does that help me or any young person get a job today? How does that help anyone anywhere trying anything to better their circumstance?
All good things must come to an end and those good times ended. We are in a time of economic uncertainty for a variety of technological and sociological reasons. I think no one alive can predict what the future will bring. The past can help understand the present but it cannot predict the future. Pointing the finger at Boomers will not help you prepare for the restructured economy. You can argue about specific solutions to help people in that new economy and I would be glad to do that but the moment it becomes "but but Boomers had it better!" I lose respect for you and your "solutions". Call me callous. Call me cold. I don't care because I am more interested in ideas that can benefit society and the individual than bear some collective guilt or resentment because "muh boomers".
So it means (more) kids these days need a (useful) degree. OH LOOK! That's getting really fucking expensive. Sucks to be them. It's like they're not really that well off or something. We've come full circle back to the article.
What is the new reading, writing, and arithmetic of the 21st century? If there are skills that are necessary for an average citizen to participate in the global economy, there is already an institution of learning that is provided by that government. High school. It would be an easier sell to say "fix high school to better accommodate the restructured economy and promote trade schools" than to say free college for every snow flake to get a gender studies who then then protests free speech and the very society that bore them that entitled spoiled life.
I would have more sympathy for college education funding if colleges were not producing what appears to be indoctrinated cultural maxists. I have seen too many examples of universities and students decrying and working against the freedoms and liberties this nation was built on that too many people have died to gain and protect.
Which many grads will happily sign up for within weeks of graduating, and pay off in 60 or 72 months. But asking them to pay of their student loans is some sort of crime against humanity.
The trust fund running out in and of its self isn't a problem. The problem is the lack of revenue to the program and has been for quite some time and over the last 17 years every president has paid lip service to the underlying problem but has done nothing. As time marches on the problem is only going to get harder to solve. I was not commenting on how good or bad it was only pointing out that it looks like it isn't going to be perpetual decreases in payouts. What should be more worrying is some of the proposals that people have for fixing it. The one that gets me is the means testing one which would basically prevent those who managed to plan because they ended up paying in but then don't get anything. The people who would be hit by it won't be the wealthy but instead would be the middle class who still managed to save for their retirement and/or who happen to be getting a pension. So for someone like me who makes a good living (not rich by any means but comfortable) manages to live cheaply and has saved quite a bit and who's wife is a teacher and would be getting a teacher pension it basically means the wife and I get fucked royally. I get to shovel money into SS and the like but with means testing I will likely get told to piss off when I go to collect.
Time to offend someone
The problem is that higher ed. has a lock on the market. If they feel they will not get enough citizen students then they could easily fill the seats with foreign nationals.
These foreign students not only drive up tuition, they compete for grants further driving up the costs for citizens and thus tuition borrowing.
Sounds like outsourcing, right?
Also There was this implied promise that if you did the work and bore the expensive of a college degree that you would somehow be more successful.
Then they either moved manufacturing to slave labor totalitarian states and gave the rest of the work to outsourcing maggot wranglers.
Entitlement? To quote Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
I'm a child of a WW2/Korean Conflict aged parents. I'm 46 years old, I am not an unintelligent moron, and amazingly, I'm a Trump voter. I think you have a lot to learn about entitlement, (and your opinion of intelligence and who's an arsehole) because it's not what you think it means. Entitlement means you gave up something to be entitled for it. As for the despising of younger generations actions and mentalities, some of it is WELL EARNED. The millennials now (my children's age and older) have a SENSE of entitlement, but no actual *entitlement* to anything if they haven't sacrificed and paid for it. If they have, fine. But this whole "it's not fair" mentality has got to go. My generation and older has been trying to give them a free clue: "Life's not fair. Suck it up, buttercups. Do something about it that makes sense, otherwise you're part of the problem." They fail to understand simple concepts like economics and personal responsibility, and all seem to still share the same "kids in the toybox" mentality of "share everything, and throw a tantrum if you don't get your way".
People like these millenial/antifa children are the reason we have idiots like Bernie Sanders preaching his economically ignorant socialist promises running around, and AntiFA (Anti-First Amendment is more like it) people rioting, pepper spraying, smashing windows and burning shit. Don't expect to be taken seriously if you defend their idiocy, because the adults in the room are tired of it. My generation didn't have everything handed to them "on a golden platter". We actually understand what a work ethic is, and what sacrifices are.
Comments like these are EXACTLY why Trump won.
$20K to $34K over 10 years averages 5.4% per year. According to College Board data on public 2yr, public 4yr, and private 4 yr colleges, tuition and fees increased from 2006-7 to 2016-17, on average, 4.5%, 5.2%, and 4.1%, respectively. (These are all compounded rates and the tuition/ fees are enrollment weighted)
So the extra debt is likely, due mostly to tuition increases, with public 4 yr colleges being the worst offenders.
FYI - Using simple averages debt went up 7% and tuition/fees 5.5%, 6.6%, and 5.0%. Still close, but compounding is more accurate, since this year's tuition increase is always based on last year's tuition.
Source for college board data is below, but you need to look at the current dollar tuition/fees from Table 4 in the excel data. The PDF and presentation are all corrected for general inflation while the original Fed presentation on student debt, that this article is based on, appears to use nominal dollars, i.e. dollars uncorrected for inflation.
https://trends.collegeboard.or... (See download box in upper right.)
Nope, PhD here, zero debt, graduated recently. If you actually go into a field that has value, tuition is paid by the school and you recieve a stipend to support yourself.
would you care to point to your reference for this proof? Because in (to pick a year at random) 1960 minimum wage was a buck, and harvard's tuition was $1520 per year (both from here). Certainly 1520 hours of work would not be trivial to wrap classes around, but it's still not even full time.
I was talking general, not necessarily IT.
But even if your list "works", it doesn't scale to mass numbers of workers laid from factories. There's not enough openings for them all even if they all worked 80 hours a week and drank lots of caffeine.
Table-ized A.I.
I think you missed the point I was making. The point was, a degree at any cost is not beneficial. Sure, a degree is great. Is it still great if it takes you 20 years to pay it off? If you can't go through college and, at the end, walk away with your degree and no debt (or at least minimal debt) you are not doing yourself any favors.
"The standard repayment plan for federal student loans puts borrowers on a 10-year track to pay off their debt, but research has shown the average bachelor's degree holder takes 21 years to pay off his or her loans."
Think about that.... 21 fucking years.