A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College

By ANDREW MARTIN and ANDREW W. LEHREN

ADA, Ohio — Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.

“If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Ms. Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith.

Ms. Griffith, 23, wouldn’t seem a perfect financial fit for a college that costs nearly $50,000 a year. Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.

“As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” said Ms. Griffith, a marketing major. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”

With more than $1 trillion in student loans outstanding in this country, crippling debt is no longer confined to dropouts from for-profit colleges or graduate students who owe on many years of education, some of the overextended debtors in years past. Now nearly everyone pursuing a bachelor’s degree is borrowing. As prices soar, a college degree statistically remains a good lifetime investment, but it often comes with an unprecedented financial burden.

Ninety-four percent of students who earn a bachelor’s degree borrow to pay for higher education — up from 45 percent in 1993, according to an analysis by The New York Times of the latest data from the Department of Education. This includes loans from the federal government, private lenders and relatives.

For all borrowers, the average debt in 2011 was $23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports. Average debt for bachelor degree graduates who took out loans ranges from under $10,000 at elite schools like Princeton and Williams College, which have plenty of wealthy students and enormous endowments, to nearly $50,000 at some private colleges with less affluent students and less financial aid.

Here at Ohio Northern, recent graduates with bachelor’s degrees are among the most indebted of any college in the country, and statewide, graduates of Ohio’s more than 200 colleges and universities carry some of the highest average debt in the country, according to data reported by the colleges and compiled by an educational advocacy group. The current balance of federal student loans nationwide is $902 billion, with an additional $140 billion or so in private student loans.

“If one is not thinking about where this is headed over the next two or three years, you are just completely missing the warning signs,” said Rajeev V. Date, deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal watchdog created after the financial crisis.

via Student Loans Weighing Down a Generation With Heavy Debt – NYTimes.com.

This is the latest meme floating around the country these days. I guess George Zimmerman is on vacation.

College tuition is too fucking expensive. Kids are overwhelmed with student loans they can never pay back. There are no jobs anymore for liberal arts majors. These poor kids are stuck back in their parents house and drowning in debt.

Debt is a great way to control people. Force a kid into debt and they will suck your dick for a loan payment. There is a lot of dick sucking going on in this economy.

Graduating into a shitty economy cripples a young persons wages for the rest of their lives. They will never recover. They’ll be behind in their earnings forever.

Student loans can’t be erased by bankruptcy. They will follow you into the afterlife. If you default, your wages can be garnished. If you default long enough, your social security checks can be garnished. You’ll be burdened into old age by a purchase you made in your youth. What a wonderful way to keep people under your thumb.

Not too long ago, college was free. CCNY in New York City was free. The University of California system was free. And you didn’t just get what you paid for, you got a world class education.  The tuition was subsidized by the fine taxpayers in the state. The theory was that investing in the education of students was good for business. An educated workforce would help the economy grow and earn the taxpayers a tidy return on their investment. We still do the same thing with elementary and high school education, but somewhere along the line between tax breaks for the wealthy and the ballooning deficits, subsidized higher education fell by the wayside.

If college is too expensive and less students get educated, the Brotherhood of Darkness can keep consolidating their power. Gone are the days of be able to work your way through college. Unless you have Mitt Romney for a dad, you’ll be borrowing money to pay for school.

I feel bad for the kid borrowing $100,000 for a communication degree. He is insane. He’ll never be able to pay that off. Unless he becomes the next Oprah. Someone should have set that kid straight before he borrowed a single dollar.

These disenfranchised students ought to just quit paying their loans. If enough students said fuck you to Sallie Mae, then Sallie Mae would be fucked. These kids ought to pool what little money they have together and buy North Dakota. They could go up there and start a kibbutz. This economy is fucked. It makes no sense for these students to try playing the same old game. Go North Young Man. Global Warming is your friend.