ADA, Ohio — Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.Read the rest here.
“If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Ms. Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith.
Ms. Griffith, 23, wouldn’t seem a perfect financial fit for a college that costs nearly $50,000 a year. Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.
“As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” said Ms. Griffith, a marketing major. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”
With more than $1 trillion in student loans outstanding in this country, crippling debt is no longer confined to dropouts from for-profit colleges or graduate students who owe on many years of education, some of the overextended debtors in years past. Now nearly everyone pursuing a bachelor’s degree is borrowing. As prices soar, a college degree statistically remains a good lifetime investment, but it often comes with an unprecedented financial burden.
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4 comments:
Easier for the elite to keep the rest of us in line if only they can go to college.
Student loans are a scam. See this link for the details: http://www.collegescholarships.org/research/student-loans/
A university education is generally a waste of time and money in today's world, unless you go into medicine, law, hard science or engineering. Pretty much everything else can be self-taught, including IT. Those years of university are sunk opportunity costs that could have been spent getting your career going, earning money, and learning a trade. Another thing most developed nations have that the US doesn't: free or nearly free university education. Student debt is an intentional government-controlled way to keep people in a servile position for years to come.
A college degree used to indicate that one was able to acquire knowledge and apply reason, which is why it was considered important for so long. But, I think many people are awakening to the fact that colleges have not dispensed with teaching reason and chased after obscure facts that have less and less bearing on the real world. Nowadays, fewer students enter college prepared for college, and fewer college students exit college prepared for the real world.
I know I'm also crippled by college debt. Honestly, it's changed my entire attitude about education in this country and I have a feeling that if something isn't done soon it will unleash a financial crisis worse than the housing bubble.
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