I think student loans have been in the US for a lot longer than the UK
Talking of the UK system, I had effectivley been denied access to higher education by the coalition with zero chance of things improving with the current government. Unable to physically or psychologically do the jobs that I am qualified for, I am resigned to spending the rest of my life on disability benefits. I don’t want to, it’s boring and depressing but I can’t see any other way of surviving.
TL;DR
The UK government has tried to save a few thousand pounds and ended up costing the taxpayer hundreds of thousands over the next 30 years.
Majors don’t promise anything, neither do colleges or universities. They do however reflect that you know something about the area of study they are in, the proverbial ‘foot in the door’ which despite your dismissal, happens all the time.
All you are showing is that you have zero actual understanding how higher education works.
I’m not sure how we’d go about organizing such a thing. The trick is getting a large number of people visibly committing to it at once. You’d need some group or groups with sufficient visibility to make an initial call. Maybe Occupy could have done something like this, at its peak. I can think of a few institutions that might try – the Green Party, labor unions – but it’s hard to imagine them actually doing that at the moment.
In principle, it seems simple. As a general rule, they can punish individuals and small groups with ease, but can’t punish hundreds of thousands in a coordinated action – not so easily anyway. Could they garnish the wages of millions at once? No one could buy anything. The economy would collapse. They can’t do it. They’d have to make some concesion.
So we’d want an end result involving debt relief, the elimination of college tuitions, and the lasting message that mass action in disobedience can win results.
I’m not the one that starting using the word “promise”. Maybe you should save your attitude for the person who outright claimed that some majors promise high-paying jobs?
I don’t have a college degree, but I amassed no debt in the process of not obtaining that degree. I was too busy working in my chosen field of electrical engineering. I’ve never had to look for a job since. White male privilege, or being a hopeless nerd in high school, may have contributed to this lucky situation.
My children are not interested in assuming any college loan debt either. I can help that happen by continuing to work in my chosen field at the local state university, where my employment gives my kids 75% off their in-state tuition.
I noticed last year, when my older son graduated from a local high school that’s consistently ranked in the top five in the country, that most of the graduating seniors also elected to attend the state universities, rather than enter the predatory student loan system by attending expensive private liberal-arts schools. I was pleased.
I guess everyone who doesn’t go to college should be a plumber then.
You are aware that working class jobs exist at a fraction of their levels of decades ago and that working Americans never got the jobs back that disappeared in 2008, right?
Yeah, you should stay poor and work in McDonald’s. How dare you you think you can get an education without indenturing yourself (like every other industrialized nation)?!!!
Hell, look at those crazy Germans who educate anyone legally in the country for free.
Judging by your profile picture (and, well, the fact that you’re talking about your kids in college) I think it has more to do with your age than anything else. Things are different now - a lot different. And a lot worse. I went in-state, got an engineering degree, and I’m paying $360 a month three years out (using a plan that delegates most of my payments to later on, which will be hugely expensive), am only making $15/hour with my three years experience (with no benefits, no time off, no vacation, and no holidays) with a degree I was “promised” was going to be a top earner, and have constantly been trying to look for better work… and haven’t been able to find much. This isn’t even unusual - the guy in the last job I was at had more experience than I did, and hadn’t got a raise in over 3 years, but couldn’t find better work.
The market, right now, is fucked. Companies have found out that they can take advantage of people, and are doing so gleefully. Look at the rise of “unpaid internships”.
Frankly, people my age are tired of sanctimonious old-timers (not you, nixiebunny but you see lots of them in threads like these) who have no idea what the market is like anymore lecturing “those damn milennials” on how to survive, when they have no idea what it’s like anymore. There’s a LOT of bitterness… and if peoples biggest worry is someone not paying their debts, rather than the way the entire system is being fucked over, it’s pretty clear they care more about the rich making money then they do an entire generation being fucked over.
What decade was this? Not within the last 20 years, I assume.
My daughter goes to a state school in her own state. It still costs about $30,000 a year. Luckily, she has a father with an engineering job dedicated to keeping her from amassing debt. Most people aren’t so lucky.
I’m sorry that the job market is treating you that way. I think the difference with me is that I studied electronics as a small child, and so was able to build usable electronic equipment by the time I was in college. So I may have been in the top 5% of employability at that point in my life, by virtue of stuff that I didn’t learn in school.
My nephew has followed the same path, with a high school robotics experience to help him. He was employed as an undergrad by another department, and when he left, his employer said he couldn’t find anyone else his age with such a practical skill set.
I currently am a mentor with a high school robotics club, so that other students can get the sort of hands-on learning that will prepare them for a life of easy job hunting.
Go take your meds, gramps, your age is showing. You have no idea what it is like for people in their 20s looking for jobs now or how much debt they truly amass. You can either finger wag at “kids these days” or show a little more understanding.
One of the weird things about college financing is that state universities can turn out to be considerably more expensive than private universities, if you’re on financial assistance.
The trick is, both will offer financial aid packages that lower the effective costs of certain expenses – tuition, fees, books – but not necessarily the “total cost of attendance”, including the costs of housing and food. Private universities, with their massive endowments, are more likely to offer grants to meet those other costs; public universities will almost always expect you to take out loans.
(And don’t even bother suggesting working part time. That’s a requirement in any case, but it’s a drop in the bucket.)
I found Siegel’s arguments to be ethically weak. He’d had decades to either repay or renegotiate the loans, but the language in the piece suggests he never tried. However, I don’t give a damn about some whining middle aged mediocrity. I give a damn about what is being done right now, to legions of far better people in the generation who’ve come after him.
I blame the Times – intensely – for publishing this essay at this particular point in time. The student loan problem in the U.S. is not properly typified or individualized by the whinging of some sorry old liberal arts graduate from the 1970s. They chose to “cover” this topic by running a piece that was as contemptible as possible – and by ignoring reality on the ground for the new majority, who struggle to stay above water in our stagnant economy, and who face decades of penury due to ridiculous loan burdens.
The Times should be lambasted for this piece. It was clearly designed as clickbait, and appears to have been artfully placed (in time & space) so as to discredit the masses of young people who are under the gun right now.
Of course, none of them are subscribers. It is tired old whiners like Siegel who make up the Times’ paying readership. And he wrote exactly what they want to be reading about this issue. His unsympathetic sniveling allows them to excuse their own sins. Our universities became bloated and excessively costly on their watch. They failed to save enough to send their kids through school without burdensome, injurious loans. This unsympathetic, ugly piece “absolves” them of it all. Because they now “know” that Siegel is “characteristic” of all those (much younger) people out there who are struggling to make a go of it in our winner-takes-all economy. They read it in the Times.
The editorial decision to run this piece was the sort of artful, hard-to-pinpoint connivance that the Grey Lady excels at. And it was quite contemptible.
