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30% of America's Student Loan Borrowers Can't Keep Up After Six Years (cnbc.com)
The IRS recently ruled that under some circumstances employers can link their 401(k) matching contributions to the amount of an employee's student loan repayments -- making it easier for recent graduates to take advantage of this employer benefit. But that's one spot of good news in a sea of bad, according to one anonymous Slashdot reader:
Two new articles criticize America's student loan policies (under both the Obama and Trump administrations). CNBC cites reports that within six years, more than 15% of student borrowers had officially defaulted, while 10% more had stopped making payments and another 4.8% were at least 90 days late. And for-profit colleges fared even worse, where nearly 25% of graduates defaulted, and a total of 44% faced "some form of loan distress."
These trends were masked by Department of Education reports which stopped tracking repayment rates after just three years (reporting defaults rates of just 10%), according to Ben Miller, senior director for post-secondary education at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. "Official statistics present a relatively rosy picture of student debt. But looking at outcomes over more time and in greater detail shows that hundreds of thousands more borrowers from each cohort face troubles repaying."
These trends were masked by Department of Education reports which stopped tracking repayment rates after just three years (reporting defaults rates of just 10%), according to Ben Miller, senior director for post-secondary education at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. "Official statistics present a relatively rosy picture of student debt. But looking at outcomes over more time and in greater detail shows that hundreds of thousands more borrowers from each cohort face troubles repaying."
Help me out here; people accepted these loans, having access to the terms ahead of time, correct? They were adults, presumably, who made these commitments, right?
Why, then, should we be looking to forgive them for making bad choices? Stupid decisions should be painful, so as to teach people not to do them anymore.
I say this as someone who will be paying off his student loans for at least the next 20 years. I made a remarkably stupid decision and I'll own the consequences.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
maybe those going to collage are not doing a proper ROI (Return on Investment) analysis before making their collage and funding choices.
;)
A collage degree does not guarantee financial success. The entire process needs to be approached and executed with diligence and awareness.
Since it seems to me even public collages have no problem helping students run up huge debts they know won't provide the student with a marketable
skill set to lay a firm foundation for paying back the borrowed money. The collages (public and private) are corrupt and deeply involved in this problem.
Just my 2 cents
If we had just let the market work, the only people that would have been going to college would have been the wealthy, those that actually earned scholarships or those WHOSE STUDY HABITS & MAJOR SELECTION would have shown to a commercial lender that they were a worthwhile risk.
The end result would have been college costs not rising at 3x inflation, no public money wasted on students whose prospects were poor anyway, likely many more engineers and a lot fewer Russian Medieval Literature majors serving coffee at Starbucks.
But no. The social engineers felt it was necessary that everyone go to colleges, with Pell Grants and government backed loans, the result being now a college degree is pretty much a requirement for any job (whether it requires it or not), and students with no serious prospect of decent income are saddled with ridiculous debt.
Nice job, social engineers.
-Styopa
It has nothing to do with Socialism. In most of Europe University if free or costs a token amount. This has not driven quality into the ground. What you actually observe is a market failure where blind trust in capitalism has turned out to be very, very stupid, because capitalism as practiced today is all about short-term profits and no strategic view.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You're absolutely right. It doesn't have to be that way, either.
I took a long break from college, going back later in life. By that time I had already learned some painful lessons abkut debt, having learned from my own mistakes.
I went to a very inexpensive state university and rather than graduating with a mountain of debt, I graduated with MORE money than the roughly $0 I had when I started school. I chose a degree in a field that's in demand, and a program I which I earned respected industry certifications like Cisco CCNA as part of my degree program. Halfway through school, the certifications and things I had learned allowed me to double my income.
Shortly after graduating, I landed a job making just shy of $100K in Texas (equivalent to $200k on the coasts).
Tuition at WGU is $6,000 / year, minus the $1,500 tax credit, so my total cost of school for four years $18,000. Except halfway through I had those certs which got me a job where my employer paid part, so the total cost to me was about $15,000. No need to graduate with $90,000 in student loans!
The $24,000 (or $15,000) cost of my degree was a great investment to start earning $100,000/year, so perhaps it makes sense for the government to encourage people to study fields that are in demand, via a school that provides good value. The problem is some people's idea of "fairness" means they have the government encouraging people to spend any amount of money to study any ridiculous thing.
If you want to see seven years at $50,000/year studying French History, you can sure do that if you have the $350,000 to spend. If you DON'T have $350,000, it's probably dumb to go $350,000 in debt studying French History at Yale. Perhaps the government shouldn't encourage people to do that.
the problem. College was _always_ this expensive. We haven't done anything radical to colleges. The dorms aren't that nice. There's a few that are and they're for the rich kids. You pay extra to get into them, there's fewer of them and most kids pay for the cheap dorm or off campus living (or with their folks). I'm putting a kid through college right now.
Public Universities are _public_. They don't operate on supply and demand. They don't raise prices just because they can. Again, I'm putting a kid through college and saw this first hand. My kid's program had half as many slots as qualified (GPU > 3.8) applicants. They used interviews, sports and volunteer activities to sort out who got in (no, they did not use skin color). If it was supply & demand they'd have just raised tuition unit they only had the # of applicants for slots. Like you do for a Britney Spears concert or a sports game.
What made the price of college sky rocket was Clinton & Bush slashed federal funding. Again, college was _always_ expensive. You didn't notice because 70-80% of the cost was paid by the federal government. The Mega Corps allowed this because they needed a trained workforce. Now that they've got H1-Bs and outsourcing they don't need us anymore; and they wanted those tax dollars back. So they bought off Congress & the last several presidents for tax cuts and had funding slashed. You and your children have been made obsolete.
Go drag your ass down to your local University and pull up some college newspapers on microfiche from the late 90s/early 2000s. You'll find story after story, all meticulously researched by college economics professors, discussion this and how loans would start cropping up leading to a debt crisis. What you will _not_ find is any discussion of this in the regular newspapers (outside of a few left wing rags). Our mass media is owned by billionaires and they squashed these stories.
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I never understood...
That is abundantly clear based on your nonsensical post.
Instead of making shit up in a failed attempt to prove your point, why don't you do a little research first? Start here: https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-...
HS Diploma: $712/week or $37k/yr
Bachelor's Degree: $1173/week, or $61k/yr
Sure, making up a number and choosing $10k/yr more per year makes college not seem worth it. Now redo your math with $24k/yr more. And don't forget to include the difference in unemployment rate and benefits too.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Betsy DeVos? How many people entered college, then left college, and fell years behind on their loan payments under Betsy DeVos? (Reminder, she's been in office less than two years.)
Betsy doesn't set admission criteria, Betsy doesn't set tuition rates, and she definitely didn't establish student loan repayment regulations... Pseudoscience ill-equipped, borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to finance remedial math and english classes to compensate for their miserable high school educations are a bit responsible? When you borrowed $60-100K to study some useless major (like womensstudies, French literature, or philosiphy) how big you plan on paying back? Didn't you understand that $60K over 10 years is $500/month, every month, for the next ten years - that's $500/month before you pay rent, but food, a car, or utilities/cellphone/etc?
Ken