From DJ Leary’s op-ed in the The Star-Tribune: After college graduation, biology takes over, one debt invariably falls in love with another student debt, and they merge their individual debts. Assuming average student loans debt, the newly married couple now owes about $50,000. How’s that for starting out in tough shape? A ten-year payment effort [...]
In this straight-forward story from the Detroit News about college debt collectors, someone speaking for the U.S. government says that there’s no problem with the ballooning number of non-paying debtors: “These are not cancellations or forgivenesses,” Madzelan said. “The department will collect on these loans.” Well, sure. Later in the story, they discuss the matter [...]
April 28, 2009 – 11:03 am
The WSJ has a nice, long story about China’s blind rush into educating their country. They’ve built big schools, cheered on graduates and watched enrollments rise 30% year after year after year. That trend may end now because many of the graduates are discovering there aren’t any jobs for them. After all, China used to [...]
April 27, 2009 – 12:07 pm
It’s funny to watch people hyperventilate about credit card use by college students. According to this post at the Consumerist analyzing this report from Sallie Mae, students have 4.6 cards and run up debts of several thousands of dollars. The median debt is about $3k. That’s not good news, but it pales compared to the [...]
April 27, 2009 – 12:01 pm
Mark Taylor has a great Op-Ed piece in the NY Times today. He begins: GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research [...]
April 22, 2009 – 12:51 pm
If a rising tide carries all boats, then an ebbing tide scuttles them equally as well. The Boston Globe has a nice piece about the way that Harvard students are forced to deal with rejection. I feel sorry for them because they’re talented and hard working but the world loves to revel in their failures. [...]
A Brigham Young professor is the latest to get press by pushing the idea that the old college model is broken and the lecture hall will disappear by 2020. Perhaps. Elaine Jarvik from the Deseret News writes up his ideas here and Slashdot hosted a discussion here. The typical debate revolved around questions like where [...]
April 21, 2009 – 12:08 pm
Some genius somewhere obviously decided that it was a great idea to stop students from defaulting on their loans by making it practically impossible to discharge them. Credit card bills are unsecured. The mortgage company can repossess your house. But the college debt never ends until it is paid off. So what happens to someone [...]
April 21, 2009 – 11:54 am
That great quote comes from an article in the WSJ by Anne Marie Chaker. Sarah Kostecki, the poor student on the receiving end of the fiscal hickory stick, ran up $87,000 is debt at DePaul university. The rest of the article talks about how the default rate on loan debt is rising.
I tried to be controversial when I called college life a “bubble”. Being provocative is the only reason to have a blog like this. But someone always comes along to trump you. Charles McGrath wonders in the NY Times whether creative writing programs are a Ponzi scheme, the sort of thing that Bernard Madoff might [...]
The NY Times has a shocking headline, “Recession hits the well-educated, too.” There may have been a time long ago when the educated did not suffer like the rest. But I think only the foolish believe that will be the case today. The story tells the sad story of a hard working man who went [...]
That staple of conservative, stable, middle-of-the-road America is starting to drift out of the haze of college obsession. The headline of this survey of the college scene is “Colleges are the ones facing rejection.” Certainly with prices so high and well-paying jobs so scarce, more and more people won’t get much out of college except [...]
It’s often too early in life for the college bound to consider how debt will affect their marriage. Heck, they’re still in the tragic Romeo-and-Juliet phase of experiencing love. But the WSJ has a nice, short piece about how couples need to come to terms with debt. That student debt will haunt your love life [...]
In what is surely a good indication that the young man didn’t learn one thing about life during his time in Eden, Robert Applebaum is pushing hard to get the world to forgive everyone’s student loans. And why not? He worked hard. He bettered himself. He’s a nice guy. Why not take that nasty weight [...]
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