The nation’s student debt is equal to that of America’s total credit card obligations. For decades, easily bamboozled students have been loading up on debt to pay college tuition. The students are led to believe that they will “make it all back”.
The students have been hearing lies. Some will never “make it all back”. Since college debt can’t be gotten rid of by declaring bankruptcy, some older people are now finding that their Social Security payments are being attached to pay student loans that they borrowed a half-century ago. The accrued interest on some of them make it impossible to repay.
If colleges had focused on education, the costs would have been lower, and a couple generations of college students would have had much more enjoyable, debt-free lives. Now, many colleges and universities have more “administrators” than teachers. Those high salaries, benefits, and pensions are all paid for by students driven more deeply into debt.
Most tuition and expenses at Public Universities run about $20,000/year. Private institutions cost around $40,000/year. Since most students take more than four years to graduate (not because they can’t do the work, but because required courses are not made available, forcing extra attendance), their debt loads are staggering.
StraighterLine.com offers college courses for $99.00/month. They have become the low cost producer of knowledge transfer. Existing schools will either try to make the StraighterLine.com business models illegal, drop their prices, switch over to similar practices, or go out of business.
Either way, lots of overpaid, under-worked pseudo-intellectuals will be hitting the unemployment lines in the next few years. People are as heart-broken over that as by the death of a vampire bat in Brazil.
