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Students Are Using Their Loan Money To Buy Cryptocurrency, Study Says (fastcompany.com)
Student loans aren't just for buying textbooks, No. 2 pencils, and apples for bribing teachers anymore. According to a recent survey, as many as one in five college kids may be using their student loans to cash in on the cryptocurrency craze. From a report: The Student Loan Report surveyed 1,000 current college students with student loan debt about whether they were asked whether they used their student loan money to invest in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and found that 21.2% of them have Sallie Mae to thank for their cryptocurrency investment. Many students borrow a little more money than is necessary to pay for tuition and books, according to Student Loan Report. The leftover cash is typically used for college living expenses, but some wily students think that investing in Ethereum or Ripple may be a better investment than a bachelor's degree in comparative English literature.
I'm used to working with grants and government loans. Typically, you at the end don't actually see the money, you get to distribute money from the fund provided and have to give a pretty good accounting.
Stuff like meals and lodging are scrutinized and only permitted to a certain extent, so how do students get this 'free money' to "live off" in school so they can spend it on frivolous stuff? Back in my day, we used to have this thing called "a job" and you worked at it vacations, weekends and nights to get food. It's a 30 year loan at like 4-5%, that's almost as good a a mortgage.
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I don't know about cryptocurrency, though.
What I do know is that I felt very proud to not take the full cost of attendance out as loans when I was doing my degree. I thought (and the "adults" told me) that I was very smart to minimize my borrowing.
I know two separate people who took out the full cost of attendance loan (max they could get) every semester they were in school, and used that money as down payments on their first rental buildings. Years later, they both now have small real estate empires, the loans are paid off, and one retired in his '30s, all started by student loans. Both leveraged their student loan debt into investments that paid off.
Meanwhile, I was under the debt thumb for years and years and am still working for a salary 50+ hours a week. Someone was smart, and it wasn't me (despite what the older generation applauded me for).
On the other hand, I'm not sure that cryptocurrency is quite the same deal. Seems like it would be smarter to invest and rent-seek as the people that I know did.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
College is a highly-speculative position. It's part of why some of us are advocating for apprenticeship and trade school programs as well as just college access. The Democratic party has sort of built a narrative where you go to college and you're a winner, or you don't go to college and you're a loser; it doesn't work like that.
College educations require several years of time investment. Full-time college requires large amounts of attention and takes a toll on your capacity to work, which means you're either driving yourself insane or you're losing financial ground--yes, you can go to college and come out behind someone who skipped all that and tried to drive right into a career.
The rate of advancement of a minimally-educated, self-studied, experienced worker after four years is much higher than that of a new graduate with little practical experience; and there are far more basic engineer positions in technical fields (e.g. IT) than there are senior, lead, or management positions (e.g. CISO). You'll get to be a highly-valuable engineer earlier (in time) if you start out by diving into work and a little part-time study than you will if you do a solid bachelor's degree and then begin your career 4 years late; you might not have the career opportunities of a college graduate, but you'll be a well-paid engineer or senior engineer earlier the graduate who doesn't get those opportunities.
You'll also be damned far ahead in terms of money by that time.
Student loans make this even worse, of course, because you end up stacking up debt while you can't pay it off, and it collects interest while you wait. The Federal government pays that interest in subsidized deferments; otherwise you're going to mainly pay interest on your loan, making the actual cost of college tiny in comparison to the cost of the loan with which you paid for college.
The biggest risk, however, is the job market.
250,000 IT positions became available this year. Over the next 5 years, we project another 1.5 million positions. Sounds great, right?
What you see: 40% turn-over of job rate. HR working with anywhere from 3 to 15 recruiters. Each job gets posted 15 times on every online job search system. Millions upon millions of IT jobs pop up all throughout the year. A super hot market!
We have projections of IT worker demand growth. We have projections of salary growth. How many other students are running to college for IT?
Do you know if there will be an enormous glut of IT workers in 5 years? Do you know if there will be a slow-down in hiring? No.
That's the risk you take.
It's why we need to create some sort of cooperative employment programs, apprenticeships, and vocational programs. We want to do something like provide free access to two- or four-year college for everyone with less than $100,000/year of income (good luck with that: Donald Trump Jr. just has to move out of his dad's house when he turns 18, get a small apartment paid ahead by his father, and have daddy not claim him as a dependent so he can take free college; how do we write the legal language?). We also need to provide a way for them to ensure they won't come out of college begging for a McJob.
We can do that with shorter programs--apprenticeships (notable for plumbers and electricians), vocational training, etc.--and with cooperative programs in which you work while you attend college or trade school. A sponsoring organization would have a job prepared for you, and leverage you while you learn.
Think about computer programmers, network engineers, and the like. Do you need a Masters Degree in Computer Science and Information Systems to do this job? Well, no. To do the job of the senior technical lead programmer, you do; to do code clean-up, implement some basic software functionality, and otherwise handle those tasks that got most programmers into programming, you just need Googlepedia.
Here's the big secret: lots of t
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Sure they'll loan people huge sums of money. Especially if they're not white. Because one way or another they want to bring back Debtors Prisons -- essentially institutionalized, legalized slavery. Get someone on the hook for a big student loan, or a sub-prime mortgage, or even too many traffic tickets, with ballooning penalties for not paying them on time coupled with seizure of drivers license and vehicle registration, and you de-facto OWN someone until they pay what they owe. Now pay them pennies an hour for prison labor, and you've got almost-free labor for their lifetime -- and since they're scumbag debtors, freeloaders on society, nobody cares about them, they're getting what they deserve. This is what White Supremacists, Dominionists, and Fascists want: it's their 'final solution' to the minorities 'problem'. Then they can sit on their fat white asses, collecting their Universal Basic Income, get high on opiods all day long, and not worry about anything.