Educated Slaves

There was a time where a family could scrimp, save and with a little bit of help from a second mortgage or a reasonably-available student loan, put their kids through college. Second mortgages have reached near extinction, impaired financial conditions and Congressional belt-tightening have pushed tuition higher while cutting precious funding resources like Pell Grants and staggeringly high unemployment rates combined with severely contracted job opportunities have actually called into question the financial basis for getting a college education except in a few fields where such educational requirements still generated better jobs.

According to the April 11^th New York Times, the aggregate of American college loans have accelerated past credit card debt and will soon pass into the $1 trillion dollar mark; the average student today carries a $24,000 debt-load upon graduation with just a bachelors degree. In 1993, half the undergrads owed loan money on graduation; today it’s two-thirds. Professional graduate schools, primarily law, medicine and business, often leave their graduates with six figure loans outstanding.

Even the President of the United States staggered under student debt: “‘We left school with a mountain of debt,’ Mr. Obama said in 2008. ‘Michelle I know had at least $60,000. I had at least $60,000. So when we got together we had a lot of loans to pay. In fact, we did not finish paying them off until probably we’d been married for at least eight years, maybe nine.’… Even then, Mrs. Obama said, it took the royalties from her husband’s best-selling books to help pay off their loans.” NY Times. That was then… student debt has close to doubled today.

Meanwhile, prestigious universities, even Ivies like Yale and Cornell, are opening campuses – mostly in Asia and the Middle East – to generate graduates likely to continue these institutions’ tradition of excellence… and pay substantial tuition without requiring any financial aid. Indeed, American colleges and universities are busy recruiting overseas for non-scholarship/loan students to make up for the loss of students able to pay in the United States. Even the number one law school in America – Yale – has experienced a 16% decline in applications this year; students just cannot afford to apply anymore. We know the graduates of the foreign campuses of these great schools are keeping their newly developed skills “over there,” and even the young men and women traveling to the United States for their higher education are returning to their home countries with vastly greater frequency than in days past (when they really wanted to stay in the U.S.). Nice to know where are educating the scions of other nations to compete with us in the future.

Defaults on post-high-school-education student loans, particularly private schools, are soaring. What’s a young graduate to do without a job or the ability to service debt? The worst numbers are for those many “for profit” colleges and universities for which getting students enrolled, regardless of the consequences, is simply a part of “business development.” Sure, there are some limits now on how much of a very low income needs to be allocated to student loan repayment, but for the most part these loans have become life-destroyers for so many who cannot get out from under the boulders of debt they carry on their shoulders: “Deanne Loonin, a lawyer at the National Consumer Law Center, said education debt was not good debt for the low-income borrowers she works with, most of whom are in default… Unlike most other debt, student loans generally cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and the government can garnish wages or take tax refunds or Social Security payments to recover the money owed. … According to the Department of Education, about a quarter of students at for-profit institutions defaulted on their student loans within three years of star ting to repay them.

“‘About two-thirds of the people I see attended for-profits; most did not complete their program; and no one I have worked with has ever gotten a job in the field they were supposedly trained for,’ Ms. Loonin said… ‘For them, the negative mark on their credit report is the No. 1 barrier to moving ahead in their lives,’ she added. ‘It doesn’t just delay their ability to buy a house, it gets in the way of their employment prospects, their finding an apartment, almost anything they try to do.’” NY Times. Repayment that used to take a few years can now embrace more than a decade. Meanwhile, the nation is sliding down the competitive ladder, constantly falling, as we find more reasons to deny our succeeding generations reasonable access to education. It’s a slow death by incremental strangulation.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s not as if these changes are hidden from our political “leaders:” they are willing to sacrifice our future in support of their deficit reduction mantra.