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Many Senior Citizens Expect To Die With College Loan Debts.
(portside.org)
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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You have a choice to not take student loans or take an amount you can pay back. Many to most people actually do this.
For many the choice to not take loans mean they cannot go to school at all. For some reason, even the most mundane and menial office job requires a college degree. This means for a lot of people they are effectively stuck working minimum wage.
Student loans are only a part of our broken system. But its one that unfortunately is forced upon many people if they want to make a living wage.
There are plenty of ways to go to college without significant loans. It often means not going to U of _ or _ state, you can easily save $20k+ over 4-5 years by just choosing a less expensive school. There's need based scholarships, community colleges, tuition reimbursement plans, military service, academic scholarships, sports scholarships, and more. You do need a plan to get through in a reasonable time frame, just taking some classes and hoping to eventually wander into a degree is a recipe for crushing debt.
Career planning is just about the biggest scam we're sold when selecting an education.
Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, can predict what the job market will look like 5-10-15 years into the future, and yet we're asking people to gamble in the casino of life to get an education and take on debt (even if you are going to a less expensive school - the person you're replying to had parents working minimum wage, nobody in that situation has the kind of spare capital to fund any education without a loan) in hopes that their chosen profession will a) still exist when they leave university b) remain viable long enough to repay their debt and c) the economy doesn't contract significantly while they are in school, resulting in a "lost generation".
You need to have a seriously high powered crystal ball to make a prediction that accurate, or just admit that we're effectively forcing kids to gamble with their futures.
Not just people, we are asking TEENAGERS to gamble on what they even like ornare interested in doing in 4+ years. These are kids!
And let's not forget that the majority of college grads are not even working in the same field as their degree.
You don't have to be a fortune teller to know a bachelor's in psych is basically useless on it's own, but no matter what you choose, getting in and out in 4-5 years is critical, 7+ years of even modest loans is going to crush you. That's the bigger point.
That's not the point I am trying to make. The point is that even those "common sense" judgements change over time, and even if you manage to get out in 5 years or less that career you picked based on common sense might be going through a recession, regression, is being replaced by foreign labor or technology, etc. etc.
Yes the employment market fluctuates, but it rarely dies. Lawyers probably had the worst of it recently, but very few majors end up with limited options rhat didn't start that way. People that entered education knew the pay sucked well before they enrolled. Tech had layoffs at the beginning of the year, but places are already hiring again.