I Will Die With Student Loan Debt

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127. I tell my college students that although it used to be possible to declare bankruptcy

on some of the private college loans, that was changed in 2005 when the bankruptcy reform bill passed. Unfortunately, most of them have no idea of those bankruptcy restrictions—and neither do their parents! For most of them I am the first person to tell them about those bankruptcy rules, and also the first who has even brought up the issue of whether it is worth it to incur such heavy, non-dischargeable debt to attend a 4-year college when they have more limited job prospects than earlier generations did when we graduated, especially since so many careers no longer pay as well as they used to, even if one can wrangle a job offer in the first place.

For most of my students I am also the first person to suggest that maybe they should take as many of the general education credits as they can at a community college while living at home to save on living expenses and working to help pay for those credits. Community colleges offer flexible schedules to accommodate the needs of working adults with families, so it is not hard to handle a part time or even a full time job while accumulating needed credits. Best of all, the credits at a community college cost only ⅓
to ½ of what they would cost at a 4-year school. I have discovered that few of my students realize how much cheaper those credits could be, but even worse, many have been actively discouraged by teachers, counselors, and even their families from attending a community college to complete their distribution requirements.

Our whole society pushes them to attend a 4-year college and to do so immediately after graduating, rather than taking a gap year or even a few years to make sure they really know what they want and are mature enough not to crash and burn during their first year in college.

I wrote a long comment about all this in another thread. Forgive me, but I think this issue is so important that I can't resist pasting that comment here. I am sorry that it is so long, but I keep hoping that if I spread the word, more adults will join me in offering more reasonable advice to naive kids and their parents.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=6721601

As someone who teaches college, I wish we didn't shove most of our high school grads into college, especially now that they must go deeply into debt from the very start to attend.

About 65% of our high school graduates go right to college, but 30% of freshmen drop out or flunk out without ever seeing their second year! They are thus saddled with thousands of dollars of debt (which they can't discharge through bankruptcy!), with little hope of getting a decent job to pay it off.

Most American college students are ill prepared to handle college-level work. They lack foundational knowledge and skills, and most also lack maturity and do not really value education. They come to college because of ignorance and social pressure.

The ignorance I refer to is their lack of knowledge about what college costs, how much they're accumulating in non-dischargeable debt (most don't even know college loan debt can't be escaped through bankruptcy!), how much more demanding college courses are, how much more rigorous the grading standards are, and how unlikely they are to find a job after college that pays well enough to enable them to pay off the huge debts they will be burdened with.

The social pressure comes from all sides. Their teachers and school counselors assume most of their school's students can and should go to college right after high school. The parents do, too, and recoil with embarrassment if their child resists the pressure and says he doesn't want to go to college, or that he wants to go eventually, but plans to take a gap year, or several gap years, first. Their friends are all excited about their college application process, about which schools they're getting acceptances from, about getting ready and then leaving for college. The kid who isn't going right after high school is left out of this excitement, and he is also subjected to the disapproval and/or pity of his peers, who can't help considering him either a loser or a fool.

If the kid is going right to college but plans to start at a community college, where he can accumulate required credits at ⅓ to ½ to cost of the same credits at a 4-year college, and where he can schedule classes in a way that allows him to work a job to help pay for school, he has marked himself as "lower class." And if he saves money by living with his family while attending college, whether it's a 2-year or a 4-year school, then he's viewed as pathetic.

The kid who postpones college for a semester or a year misses out on a lot of scholarship opportunities, so he feels pressure from that angle, too.

Another aspect of the social pressure is found in the (false) way college life is represented in popular culture. Young people want the experience they've been led to expect from campus life and cannot bear to think of missing out on it.

There are a lot of other ways to train young people for adult careers, but our society blocks many of them while insisting on a 4-year degree as the only route to adult success. Furthermore, most of the options that we do allow are marked as déclassé—even if they offer a more likely route to financial security. I know a LOT of people who have become quite affluent by training and working in a trade rather than by going to college, yet they always act embarrassed and apologetic about their lack of a college degree. Even worse, I know a lot of people with degrees, especially those with advanced degrees, who look down on even very successful people with valuable skills if those people don't have college degrees.

Unfortunately, most of the students who pour into our colleges and universities every year really are not ready for college-level study when they get here, and many never will be. We would be doing them a favor if we didn't push them into 4-year colleges, but only if we stopped requiring a 4-year degree for any sort of entry-level employment or for admission to professional schools in fields for which the distribution requirements comprising the first two years of most college majors are simply irrelevant.

One of the courses I teach, "Introduction to Poetry," fulfills a distribution requirement. I love teaching poetry, and most of my students really enjoy the course and learn to enjoy poetry. But if I ever need a brain surgeon or a lawyer, I don't care whether he knows the difference between iambic pentameter and trochaic hexameter. Nor should the employment certification for architects and engineers require them to incur extra debt to jump through such requirement hoops before being permitted to train and work in those fields.

I truly believe in the value of general knowledge of that sort, and I believe kids should be getting a whole lot more of such knowledge in their K-12 schooling. But we are stupidly (and expensively) using college for remedial education in essential reading, writing, and math skills, as well as for basic knowledge in history, culture, and the physical and social sciences. If our kids were learning foundational knowledge and skills (including time management and personal responsibility) in K-12 classes, employers and professional schools wouldn't need to require a 4-year college degree as a substitute sign that applicants might not be too ignorant, immature, and irresponsible to hire or to admit for professional training.

Then our 4-year colleges could be used for educating those with an interest in and aptitude for a specific kind of academic study, not for unnecessarily expensive remedial education and vocational training.

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[font color = "red" font size = "+2"]*[/font]BTW, none of this even gets into the issue of price gouging, which is what is going on with the fact that tuition increases at about 2½ to rate of inflation and that textbook pricing is a scam. The cost of attending public colleges used to be reasonable, because an educated populace was recognized as a public good, and other countries still recognize that fact.

[font color = "red" font size = "+2"]*[/font]Oh, and also BTW, the interest rate on federally insured loans also used to be much lower, more outright grants used to be available for students who needed financial aid, and the grants that were available, like Pell grants, used to cover a much larger portion of the cost of attending college:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/pell-grants-college-costs_n_1835081.html

The federal Pell Grant program was designed to help college students coming from low-income families afford the high cost of going to college without getting buried in debt. But the Pell Grant now covers less than one-third of the cost of attendance at public four-year university, the lowest in its history.

Where the maximum Pell Grant once covered the entire cost of obtaining a two-year degree and 77 percent of the cost at a public university in 1980, it now covers only 62 percent of the cost of a two-year degree and 36 percent towards a public four-year degree.

Even though the Pell Grant has never covered such a small fraction, it's been subject to repeated attempts to cut it and make sure it continues to shrink in the future. At the same time, the cost of college is projected to increase faster than inflation.

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