I was tempted to ignore this piece from the NY Times about a new statistical survey of the salaries earned by college grads. The Times is properly skeptical of the numbers which are all self-reported, no doubt by self-satisfied people. The most elite schools also produce the highest salaries. We’re not surprised by this because [...]
I think urban farming sounds like a good idea. Getting in touch with the land is very romantic and I’m happy to celebrate it. But if my kids tossed aside their expensive education and found happiness with a job paying $14/hour, I would feel a bit sad about the money wasted.But what if the expensive [...]
Forgiveness sounds like such a nice concept. Some loan programs are banking on this aura when they offer loan “forgiveness” if you work in the public sector or pay some percentage of your income. It sounds so nice. Ah, but there’s a hidden price. You’ll owe taxes on the forgiven loan and they’re often 30-50% [...]
Mark Jesperson racked up $350,000 in debt earning a law degree. That seems like a record to me, but I guess you can do that easily these days. He tried to declare himself bankrupt and a few lower courts agreed. But the appeals court slapped him down. One argument that seemed to have resonance was [...]
Oh, the evil tendrils of debt become even more obvious. The Atlantic discusses the new loan that supposedly limits payments to 15% of your income. Some say this is wonderful because it will encourage people to take low paying jobs of public service. Perhaps. But who pays the debt if it isn’t paid in full? [...]
I don’t want to take on the question of the proper age for a youthful cititzen to begin to experiment with the Janus-faced nectar of the gods, the stuff that Ben Franklin said was proof that God himself loved us and wanted us to be happy. But this long debate at the NY Times about [...]
Zac Bissonette, the clever kid who aims to graduate college without debt, reports on an interesting plan to estimate someone’s future earnings from their SAT scores, major and college. So someone with 2400 studying nuclear physics at MIT might be destined to make $800,000 over a life time. It all sounds so scientific, but I [...]
The NY Times’s Jonathan Glater continues to rack up some impressive stories although I’m not sure if even he’s considered the implications of today’s humdinger. A Florida flight school talked a number of students into borrowing more than $100,000 a piece to follow their dream of learning to fly. A big bank was chomping at [...]
Nancy Zimpher is the new boss at the State University system in NY (SUNY). They offered her a free house in New York or a special “apartment” in SUNY headquarters. They weren’t right for her and her husband so SUNY boosted her salary by $90,000 so she could buy her own place. We learned this [...]
Jonathan Glater has an amazing story of the front page of the NY Times today. The powers in charge of the NY Bar has declined to admit one Robert Bowman to the ranks of the lawyers. Why? The claim seems to be that he has rung up $400,000 in debt along the way and this [...]
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