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Study: 1 in 8 divorces is caused by student loan debt

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I like to make plans in advance and calculate everything out before I try to do anything. This is the curse of being a software engineer. We’re taught to take a test-first approach to design. So, when I think about marriage, I naturally think about what tests marriage is supposed to pass, and work backwards from there to requirements for each of the spouses.

Here’s some research from CNBC that might help young people to avoid a divorce, if they respect the research in their choices.

Excerpt:

When it comes to student loan debt, “for richer, for poorer” doesn’t quite cut it.

In general, finances are the leading cause of stress in a relationship, according to a study by SunTrust Bank, but student debt takes a particularly hard toll on a marriage.

More than a third of borrowers said college loans and other money factors contributed to their divorce, according to a recent report from Student Loan Hero, a website for managing education debt.

In fact, 13 percent of divorcees blame student loans specifically for ending their relationship, the report found. Student Loan Hero surveyed more than 800 divorced adults in June.

Here is a link to the full study from Student Loan Hero.

I think in general, you can’t just do whatever you want before marrying and jump into it unprepared. Marriage involves specific requirements in order to work, such as being faithful to your spouse, and buying things that you need for the marriage enterprise, like a home, and baby stuff. It doesn’t make any sense to say “I want to get married” and then not prepare for marriage by being careful about preparing for the behaviors marriage that requires of you. Being debt-free is one of those behaviors that marriage requires of you.

So how can we be debt-free, so that the marriage will be stable? Well, one way to be debt-free is to find a way to learn skills that will allow you to get a job without going to college, like being a self-taught software engineer. One of my friends actually did that, and now he’s with a very good software company as a remote worker. But if you’re going to go to college, you can avoid debt by studying something that will get you a high-paying job when you graduate.

This 2017 article from Harvard Business Review is interesting.

It says:

Examining 46,934 resumes shared on Glassdoor by people who graduated between 2010 and 2017, the researchers looked at each person’s college major and their post-college jobs in the five years after graduation. They then estimated the median pay for each of those jobs (also using Glassdoor data) for employees with five years of experience or less. Their key finding: “Many college majors that lead to high-paying roles in tech and engineering are male dominated, while majors that lead to lower-paying roles in social sciences and liberal arts tend to be female dominated, placing men in higher-paying career pathways, on average.”

Here’s the plot, and you can click it to expand it:

Starting salaries by major, broken out by gender
Median salaries by major, broken out by gender – don’t study things at the bottom!

As you can see from the graph, it’s especially important to share the message about choosing a major, salaries and student loan debt with WOMEN, because as the graph shows, they tend to choose the wrong majors, if the goal is to pay off student loans and avoid divorce. Everyone who wants marriage to go smoothly needs to choose majors that are near the top of the graph, like nursing, chemical engineering, computer science, or mechanical engineering. It doesn’t make sense to go to college if you aren’t going to graduate in one of these high-paying fields.

As you might expect from the graph, women hold the majority of student loan debt, according to the Boston Globe, and that’s because women tend to choose majors that don’t result in good-paying jobs. And we already saw how this becomes a risk factor for divorce.

Student loans delay marriage and children

Another interesting piece of data, reported by The Consumerist, is that people with student loans tend to delay marriage, which means the couple has fewer children:

As consumers navigate life’s financial journey, they are faced with major financial milestones, like buying a home. But student loans are also delaying consumers from reaching these goals.

Survey respondents report delaying homeownership (23 percent), buying or leasing a car (23 percent), having children (10 percent) and getting married (9 percent) because of their student loan burdens.

So, it’s not just that there is an increased risk of divorce from student loans, but there’s also fewer children, which means a diminished legacy. I can’t speak for how others would see this, but for myself, I want to pass on my beliefs to as many effective, influential Christian children as I can.

When I was in high school, I was far more interested in becoming an English teacher than I was in becoming a software engineer. It was my Dad who overruled my choice of college major when I was still in high school. He had me take a first-year English course at a local university. When I saw how politicized and useless it was (they were studying all sorts of politically correct postmodern relativist stuff, instead of the classics, and they weren’t trying to learn any wisdom from any of it), I chose computer science. I did what was likely to avoid divorce, and likely to support having many children.

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Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 brutal murderers: is that justice?

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On this blog, I’ve previously blogged about how the death penalty deters criminals from committing violent crimes. And in another post, I reported on the findings of famous systematic theologian Wayne Grudem about whether the Bible supports or opposes the death penalty. Well, the actions of Joe Biden, a secular leftist, have provided an occasion for us to look at the death penalty again.

Here’s a very interesting article at the The Federalist written by famous conservative theologian Dr. Robert Gagnon.

He writes:

Two days before Christmas, in the waning days of his presidency, Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 out of 40 federal prisoners to a life sentence. Only by hearing what they had done can we begin to grapple with their offense. Many of them were responsible for gruesome murders of multiple persons.

In the rest of the article, he looks at some of the murderers that Joe Biden pardoned.

Here are some:

Jorge Avila-Torrez “sexually assaulted and stabbed to death two girls — Laura Hobbs, 8, and Krystal Tobias, 9 — who had been riding their bicycles in their neighborhood in a suburb north of Chicago in 2005. Four years later, he strangled naval officer Amanda Snell, 20, inside her barrack in Arlington, Virginia.” He subsequently admitted to these crimes. A year after that, he kidnapped, raped, and strangled a woman in a secluded area of northern Virginia, leaving her for dead by the side of a road. She survived and reported the crime to police, finally leading to his arrest and conviction.

[…]Marvin Gabrion murdered 19-year-old Rachel Timmerman before she could testify in a 1997 rape case against him. He handcuffed her, covered her eyes and mouth with duct tape, wrapped her in chains, weighted her down with concrete blocks, and threw her into a lake alive. He also murdered Rachel’s 11-month-old daughter.

[…]Richard Jackson in 1994 kidnapped, raped, and murdered 22-year-old Karen Styles when she was going for a jog in Asheville, North Carolina. A hunter found her partially naked body duct-taped to a tree, with a gunshot wound to the head. Jackson later confessed to the crime.

This one is interesting because it shows the difference that the death penalty makes – it deters people who have life sentences from killing anyone else:

Anthony Battle “murdered an Atlanta prison guard with a hammer in 1994 while serving a life sentence for murdering his wife, a US Marine, in 1987.” Battle confessed that he killed the guard because he was “tired of being bossed around” and wanted to kill the first guard he saw. He showed no remorse. At Battle’s trial, three prison guards from the facility testified that Battle’s actions emboldened other prisoners to threaten staff because “without the death penalty, all prisoners … believe there is nothing that can happen to them.”

Dr. Gagnon says that it’s an injustice when someone who murders escapes the approriate punishment:

Biden’s action in commuting nearly all federal death sentences to life sentences for heinous murderers should generate a sense of moral outrage. This moral outrage emanates not from a bloodthirsty desire for vengeance but from a sense of justice regarding the value and dignity of innocent life. Taking the innocent life of one made in God’s image, especially in particularly heinous murders such as the above, requires the forfeiture of the murderer’s life (see Genesis 9:6).

One question I find myself asking is why should taxpayers get the bill for letting these people live to the end of their natural lives? They should either have to pay for their own upkeep, or family members should pay. Why do taxpayers have to get the bill? If Joe Biden wants to be so generous, then why doesn’t he get the bill for it? It seems like the secular left is always being generous with other people’s money, and being non-judgmental by risking other people’s safety.

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CNN found liable for defaming Navy veteran, has to pay $5 million

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Corporate news media is losing viewers, and no wonder – they are very biased in how they cover the news. But sometimes, they go beyond bias, and actually defame other people. Recently, CNN, a former news network, ran a story about a Navy veteran. And they got in big trouble for it. And now they have to pay millions and millions of dollars.

I have to link to the Media Research Center’s Newsbusters blog, because nobody does a better job of covering media bias than Newsbusters.

They write:

On Friday, a jury of six in Florida’s 14th Circuit Court in Bay County has found CNN liable for the defamation of Navy veteran Zachary Young and that he was entitled economic and emotional damages, a ruling that proved CNN was not worthy of their moniker “the most trusted name in news.” They also found that CNN’s reporters had demonstrated expressed malice, actual malice, and outrageous behavior, which opened the door for a massive punitive damages judgement.

The jury also found Young was entitled to $4 million in economic damages and $1 million in emotional damages. They also ruled that CNN should be subject to punitive damages, but the two sides settled Friday afternoon following nearly 90 minutes of discussions.

In another story from the New York Post, they talked about how much the punitive damages might be:

Louis G. Adolfsen, a defamation lawyer and founding member of the Melito & Adolfsen PC law firm in Manhattan, speculated that the settlement could be for as high as $25 million considering Panama City is a “rural or semi-rural” area where the jury pool is likely hostile to CNN.

Back to Newsbusters – this part is interesting. The material was false, and false to the level of defamation:

A ruling of liable meant the jury had determined CNN published the defamatory material, the material was “of and concerning” Young, the materials that was published was false, said false material rose to the level of defamation, CNN was negligent in their news reporting about Young, and that Young had sustained damages as a result of the material.

“False material rose to the level of defamation”. And these are the kinds of people who fact check what you say on social media.

Internal CNN e-mails show what they are really like:

Young’s lead counsel Vel Freedman said in his closing that the Marquardt segment ran on 11 different CNN shows both domestically and on CNN International. And, in addition to Marquardt’s defamatory report, it was accompanied by anchors making their own defamatory statements about Young.

The jury also found CNN had operated with expressed and actual malice. The evidence presented to the jury was clear; Marquardt had messaged colleagues that he was going to “nail this Zachary Young Mfucker” while calling the report was going to be “your funeral bucko.” CNN editors called him a “shit” and “a shitbag” who had a “punchable face.”

They say that journalism is one of the easiest majors to get. And when you read their internal e-mails, you really can see that they’ve never really moved beyond high school. What do people learn in journalism school? Nothing.

Anyway, it’s Saturday, so enjoy some good news.