what_now: There are people who are so afraid of debt they won't go to college at all, and they stay in a cycle of poverty.

Ooooooorrrr... colleges have to reduce their tuition rates because they can't rely on cheap federal loan money to pay the bills.

Capital One, what's in your college housing kegerator that you bought with credit?

Interesting article. Don't trust much of what comes out of the College Board. They are a for-profit operation with a business model that relies on people going to college (and graduating from college so more continue to go).

Fact: U.S. student debt is now greater than U.S. Consumer debt.

what_now: The percentage of students we're talking about isn't going to effect the tuition rates or the federal loan and grant funding.

I just mean the general idea of going into debt for college. It's not how things should work. Honestly, I think we should take a page from Germany in this regard.

New Hotness: Too little student debt is a bad thing and will hurt the economy paychecks of college administrators and professors, in that order.

what_now: Once we have universal single payer health care, retirement benefits, guaranteed vacation, paternity and maternity leave, universal primary and secondary education, we'll talk about post secondary education.

Okay, we could steal a number of pages from Germany. This is one of them.

We've got an education bubble. It's a lot like the housing bubble was....

We have a culture that believes a(n) X is worth having, no matter the cost.
We have lenders who will give money to anyone for a(n) X, no matter there ability to repay.

This means Universities can jack up the price and students will have no trouble getting bigger loans to pay for it. The only big difference is the loans are backed by the government - so we're going to have a lot of people who will spend the majority of their working years with crippling debt. I'm talking 30-40 years.

I won't defend them and say it's not their fault. But how else does an 18 year old kid rack up 200-300k in debt when they're looking at an income of $14 an hour with their mostly worthless degree? Bankruptcy laws were designed to protect people, even people who made bad choices.

I'm finishing up my Master's degree; but I have to say, honestly, if I were a high school kid graduating this year - I don't know if I'd go to college. At the very least, I'd have gone to a community college for two years. I don't know if I'd be better off or not. The four years of school I did cost me about 50k. With today's expenses, that would be closer to 100k. My salary would be virtually identical in today's market and the likelihood of my getting a job would be lower.

What about the fact that not everyone needs/should go to college? If everyone had a college degree, then the whole ideal behind it is cheapened. There's nothing wrong with a good trade school and the future earnings potential can be good as long as you don't have unrealistic expectations. For example, you probably aren't going to become a certified welder and get offered a TV show like American Choppers.

Mr. Breeze: There's nothing wrong with a good trade school

There's one thing wrong: the US doesn't really have any.

I never went to college. I have an $80k/year job.

I work beside a lot of college kids that have more debt than what I paid for my house.

College isn't a necessity if you are at least semi-intelligent and a hard worker....

what_now: Also, a lot of students won't even complete the FAFSA because they are confused about completing it or simply don't know it exists.

Anyone in that position at 17 doesn't have either the direction-following skills or innate curiosity to be taking academic classes, even at a junior college. A real tech school yes, but we do so very little of that in the US that isn't pure Devry scumminess.

It seems to me that the people who didn't take out loans and dropped out of college are a little better off than students who did take out loans and dropped out anyway.

FTA: That matters because roughly 60 percent of full-time students receive a bachelor's degree within eight years

Either 60 percent of full-time students are doctors or our colleges are filled with dumb, lazy people.

\Graduated in 4 years with a poly-sci degree from a state school.
\\Debt is about $20,000

t3knomanser:

Ooooooorrrr... colleges have to reduce their tuition rates because they can't rely on cheap federal loan money to pay the bills.

THIS

Anyone watching the trend who has an IQ above room temperature noticed that the cost of an undergraduate/graduate tuition jumped once Govt-backed loans became more popular.

I'm all for paying more for a better service, but it's tough to argue the rate of increase when the teaching staff aren't making huge bucks, services for students have remained the same, and no new technologies or tools relating to the curriculum are in place, yet your tuition went up faster than inflation.

I thoroughly enjoyed hearing the reasons why my tuition went up 6% or more each year as an undergraduate, then watching how despite the "bleak economic outlook" the university could spend 10s of millions of dollars on some trustee's pet project (while ignoring the needs of the students). Personal favorite was watching Cisco and Oracle leave campus after offering a huge donation of materials and training because they wouldn't outright pay money to the university. They were donating product and training, and that wasn't enough for the university, so they killed the deal.

Anyone who says that increased student debt is a good thing is either cherry picking their examples or is making money off the deal. It doesn't do any good for the students themselves since so much of the cost of tuition is just thrown into some trustee's personal project.

Knight without armor: Interesting article. Don't trust much of what comes out of the College Board. They are a for-profit operation with a business model that relies on people going to college (and graduating from college so more continue to go).

Fact: U.S. student debt is now greater than U.S. Consumer debt.

Yep.

hurdboy: Same thing happened in the housing market. Price isn't primarily a function of supply and demand -- it's a function of supply and available money. Where that money comes from is ultimately unimportant; if students can get ahold of it, tuition increases.

I think the key part of the article was this line:

Private borrowing (generally more dangerous to students) has dropped from about $24 billion in 2007-2008 to about $8 billion last year.

Read "more dangerous to students" as "more profitable to banks". As soon as the banksters feel the pinch, they ramp up the propaganda campaign. First it's the "take moar loans - or else!", next it's going to be the endless stream of stories telling us once again how necessary college education is.

/subby
//yes, realized my capitalization fail after the fact
///and the page 2 link fail
////but it's business tab, where they'll green anything

So, once again the media is promulgating the myth about a magical college degree as the way to move out of the poverty cycle. Heard that my whole life, and it's complete baloney. Friend of mine is an engineer with a degree who hires engineers. He tells me he prefers to hire engineers who spent the last four years taking things apart and putting them back together, than someone who spent the last four years studying for exams. He graduated from one of the top ten engineering schools and got a good job (managing engineer at a defense contractor) and still feels he got shortchanged because it didn't make him a better engineer.

Before I went back to get my degree, I spent a couple years at an assembly plant. The head of quality (and number 3 person in the place) was promoted internally without a single credit hour to his name to his position. My boss was a quality engineer, also with no degree. But several of the people I was supervising had degrees, and were making $10 an hour. They did hire engineers with degrees, but they didn't perform better than the non-degreed engineers from what I could tell.

When I was at Radio Shack, my manager was hired out of business school to be a manager, the company didn't care if he ever finished his degree (he didn't, was booted from the program for not enrolling in classes). The district manager pushed employees to take advantage of the tuition reimbursement offered by the company as part of the benefits package, but he didn't have a degree either and didn't care if anyone actually matriculated.

The fact is, when I was getting my degree most of the programs were built around specialized proprietary software and were glorified vocational ed programs so that companies wouldn't be forced to actually train someone. Instead, their prospective employees had already assumed debt to take on what would have been the company's responsibility a generation ago. The only reason my Masters program existed was because ESRI wouldn't license ArcGIS for educational purposes unless it was primarily used for a grad school program. Sure it takes two years to learn how to use the buggy piece of crap, but you could do that as a vocational program. Same thing for the HR certificate (can't be an accredited HR person without getting a certificate from the national accreditors available only through accredited 4 year programs!), non-profit work (fundraising also has a circle-jerk accreditation program) and every other "professional" field I looked at.

It is all about the bucks moving behind the scenes, the interests of "professional development" and "professional associations," the interests of professional enterprise software manufacturers and their paying clients, and student loan originators neatly coinciding with that of school administrators.

At least half of the jobs that "require" a degree on paper don't. But it raises the prestige of all in that occupation if you say it does, and a whole cash cow can be slaughtered for the feast.

Either 60 percent of full-time students are doctors or our colleges are filled with dumb, lazy people.

Or has a school with retarded scheduling - such as requiring classes X, Y and Z, and then offering them only once every 2 years and scheduling them all at the same time. Not an uncommon occurrence.

what_now: Also, a lot of students won't even complete the FAFSA because they are confused about completing it or simply don't know it exists.

If you can't complete the FAFSA then you don't belong in school.

And where is all the damned money going in education? Costs are going up everywhere but not many professors are rolling up in Lamborghini's. Economics professors still be dress'in like refugees.

And Grandparents, if you can, get your grandchild a 529 with a good start.

They did hire engineers with degrees, but they didn't perform better than the non-degreed engineers from what I could tell.

So you don't see any difference between someone with an engineering degree from an accredited university and an uneducated tinkerer?

If students graduating today had any expectation that the jobs they could get would actually let them pay off their debts, none of this would be a problem. But entry-level wages have gone down, debt has gone up, and there are less jobs than ever for the recent graduate.

Sergeant Grumbles: If students graduating today had any expectation that the jobs they could get would actually let them pay off their debts, none of this would be a problem. But entry-level wages have gone down, debt has gone up, and there are less jobs than ever for the recent graduate.

No, even worse, they still do have that expectation. You don't think that high-school kids are on Fark, do you? College enrollment is booming. Everybody and his mother (the one who pushes the kid to go to college) still thinks that a college degree is the magic bullet.

Every college I hear about is bursting at the seams. Enrollment goes up every single year, despite the tuition increases.

BolloxReader: So, once again the media is promulgating the myth about a magical college degree as the way to move out of the poverty cycle. Heard that my whole life, and it's complete baloney. Friend of mine is an engineer with a degree who hires engineers. He tells me he prefers to hire engineers who spent the last four years taking things apart and putting them back together, than someone who spent the last four years studying for exams. He graduated from one of the top ten engineering schools and got a good job (managing engineer at a defense contractor) and still feels he got shortchanged because it didn't make him a better engineer.

Before I went back to get my degree, I spent a couple years at an assembly plant. The head of quality (and number 3 person in the place) was promoted internally without a single credit hour to his name to his position. My boss was a quality engineer, also with no degree. But several of the people I was supervising had degrees, and were making $10 an hour. They did hire engineers with degrees, but they didn't perform better than the non-degreed engineers from what I could tell.

When I was at Radio Shack, my manager was hired out of business school to be a manager, the company didn't care if he ever finished his degree (he didn't, was booted from the program for not enrolling in classes). The district manager pushed employees to take advantage of the tuition reimbursement offered by the company as part of the benefits package, but he didn't have a degree either and didn't care if anyone actually matriculated.

The fact is, when I was getting my degree most of the programs were built around specialized proprietary software and were glorified vocational ed programs so that companies wouldn't be forced to actually train someone. Instead, their prospective employees had already assumed debt to take on what would have been the company's responsibility a generation ago. The only reason my Masters program existed was because ESRI wouldn't license ArcGIS for educational purposes unless it was primarily used for a grad school program. Sure it takes two years to learn how to use the buggy piece of crap, but you could do that as a vocational program. Same thing for the HR certificate (can't be an accredited HR person without getting a certificate from the national accreditors available only through accredited 4 year programs!), non-profit work (fundraising also has a circle-jerk accreditation program) and every other "professional" field I looked at.

It is all about the bucks moving behind the scenes, the interests of "professional development" and "professional associations," the interests of professional enterprise software manufacturers and their paying clients, and student loan originators neatly coinciding with that of school administrators.

At least half of the jobs that "require" a degree on paper don't. But it raises the prestige of all in that occupation if you say it does, and a whole cash cow can be slaughtered for the feast.

Nobody said you can't succeed without a degree. But you can go to college and have a fairly decent shot at getting a skilled job, or you can take your chances. College is a known quantity. Not everyone can find an employer willing to give them a shot with no real record. And not everyone can learn engineering by just taking apart some old electronics.

The purpose of college is to show employers you know something. It's not an indicator of success, it's just a way to get HR managers to notice you.

NotARocketScientist: They did hire engineers with degrees, but they didn't perform better than the non-degreed engineers from what I could tell.

So you don't see any difference between someone with an engineering degree from an accredited university and an uneducated tinkerer?

I see a big difference. The former doesn't indicate anything about ability or drive, whereas the latter does. Tinkerers are hardly uneducated - they just aren't formally educated. To date, the absolute best engineers I've known have been those who love what they do, and almost none had degrees. Give me a motivated individual who knows and loves what he does over someone who went to school to get a degree in something that'll make them money. After 2-3 years of on the job training, the degree is useless.

taxandspend: FTA: That matters because roughly 60 percent of full-time students receive a bachelor's degree within eight years

Either 60 percent of full-time students are doctors or our colleges are filled with dumb, lazy people.

\Graduated in 4 years with a poly-sci degree from a state school.
\\Debt is about $20,000

Really? 4 years of college and you don't understand the word "within"?

Knight without armor: Interesting article. Don't trust much of what comes out of the College Board. They are a for-profit operation with a business model that relies on people going to college (and graduating from college so more continue to go).

Fact: U.S. student debt is now greater than U.S. Consumer debt.

Do you have a citation for that? I'd love to be able to quote it. It's so rediculous-sounding that if it's true, wow. That's shiat you scream from the mountaintops.

Newsflash. Our economy runs on debt. More at 11.

Unforgivable high dollar loans given to clueless teenagers to make them wage slaves for life will always be good for society, right?

Mr. Breeze: What about the fact that not everyone needs/should go to college?

Because corporations want the people at the front desk to have bachelors' degrees. For running an office front desk. A job which a generation ago, with a lot less automation, could be handled by someone with an 8th grade education.

If you want to be in the middle class, you will go to college. This is the new paradigm the marketplace (employers) have set. Many of the manufacturing and other jobs which could be done with a high school diploma have been outsourced, with more on the way, never to return. The blame falls squarely on the greed of employers, having done their damndest to push any relevant training costs onto the potential employee (this usually means college) to improve their bottom line.

A college degree is also used these days as a cheap screening device. When an employer posts a job in difficult economic times such as these, thousands of applications come flooding in. Will the employer actually take the time and do some actual work in looking for the best candidate for the position? Fu(k no they won't. Regardless of the experience or skill of the candidate, if they don't have that degree on their resume they may as well not have bothered to send it. That is today's reality.

Maybe this is also why employers are constantly whining about not being able to find "qualified" candidates... they may be looking in the wrong places.

Fark_Guy_Rob: We've got an education bubble. It's a lot like the housing bubble was....

We have a culture that believes a(n) X is worth having, no matter the cost.
We have lenders who will give money to anyone for a(n) X, no matter there ability to repay.

This means Universities can jack up the price and students will have no trouble getting bigger loans to pay for it. The only big difference is the loans are backed by the government - so we're going to have a lot of people who will spend the majority of their working years with crippling debt. I'm talking 30-40 years.

I won't defend them and say it's not their fault. But how else does an 18 year old kid rack up 200-300k in debt when they're looking at an income of $14 an hour with their mostly worthless degree? Bankruptcy laws were designed to protect people, even people who made bad choices.

I'm finishing up my Master's degree; but I have to say, honestly, if I were a high school kid graduating this year - I don't know if I'd go to college. At the very least, I'd have gone to a community college for two years. I don't know if I'd be better off or not. The four years of school I did cost me about 50k. With today's expenses, that would be closer to 100k. My salary would be virtually identical in today's market and the likelihood of my getting a job would be lower.

well i went to trade school for 9 months at the cost of 8k(actually a scholarship i plan to pay back) and now have a career in aerospace with a pension and no debt so...... i'd say go to trade school over university unless your going into high-end, you actually learn applicable skills that people will pay for.

foo monkey: Knight without armor: Interesting article. Don't trust much of what comes out of the College Board. They are a for-profit operation with a business model that relies on people going to college (and graduating from college so more continue to go).

Fact: U.S. student debt is now greater than U.S. Consumer debt.

Do you have a citation for that? I'd love to be able to quote it. It's so rediculous-sounding that if it's true, wow. That's shiat you scream from the mountaintops.

let me google that for you

rewind2846: Mr. Breeze: What about the fact that not everyone needs/should go to college?

Because corporations want the people at the front desk to have bachelors' degrees. For running an office front desk. A job which a generation ago, with a lot less automation, could be handled by someone with an 8th grade education.

If you want to be in the middle class, you will go to college. This is the new paradigm the marketplace (employers) have set. Many of the manufacturing and other jobs which could be done with a high school diploma have been outsourced, with more on the way, never to return. The blame falls squarely on the greed of employers, having done their damndest to push any relevant training costs onto the potential employee (this usually means college) to improve their bottom line.

A college degree is also used these days as a cheap screening device. When an employer posts a job in difficult economic times such as these, thousands of applications come flooding in. Will the employer actually take the time and do some actual work in looking for the best candidate for the position? Fu(k no they won't. Regardless of the experience or skill of the candidate, if they don't have that degree on their resume they may as well not have bothered to send it. That is today's reality.

Maybe this is also why employers are constantly whining about not being able to find "qualified" candidates... they may be looking in the wrong places.

you can also blame the fact that people want low durable cheap shiat made from foreign countries like china than durable high-end american manufactured products that actually would cost less overall, being that they'd lose value slower. that right now is the #1 reason for income inequality, being that money is essentially being syphoned off by the rich mostly in the form of cars, electronics, food, entertainment and so on instead of collecting assets. For example, musical instruments get better with age, therefore gain value over time.

oh wait, we need that brand new 60" hdtv that'll go down 60% in value over the next 2 months!

cirby: New Hotness: Too little student debt is a bad thing and will hurt the economy paychecks of college administrators and professors, in that order.

Surprisingly, not professors.

Their salaries have remained the same and the number of professors have remained the same throughout the bubble (inflation adjusted).

Anyway, administration is where it's at. I've seen so many professors give up research and teaching for administration because of the sweet sweet student loan money. Research grant used to be the king of the hill but now administration is the big juice around, especially for the lower tier universities where the big research money never manages to trickle down fast enough.

rdyb: taxandspend: FTA: That matters because roughly 60 percent of full-time students receive a bachelor's degree within eight years

Either 60 percent of full-time students are doctors or our colleges are filled with dumb, lazy people.

\Graduated in 4 years with a poly-sci degree from a state school.
\\Debt is about $20,000

Really? 4 years of college and you don't understand the word "within"?

Yes, I do understand that "within" would include everything from one year to eight years, but I wonder why that is the statistic they use. Why eight years? Why not show the graduation rate at four years or five years? Is it because that would be a much lower and depressing number? I get that the article is pointing out that people who go to school part time and work full time may not finish their degree, I just think we shouldn't be patting ourselves on the back when we have to extend the time period all the way to eight years in order to reach that 60% statistic.

well ya know, being up to your ass in debt and being stuck flipping burgers just means you're a lazy stinking hippie, right?