From Forbes magazine, a word of caution to young people, especially to young men who intend to marry and have children.
Excerpt:
Here’s an indication of how burdensome student loans have become: About one-third of millennials say they would have been better off working, instead of going to college and paying tuition.
That’s according to a new Wells Fargo study which surveyed 1,414 millennials between the ages of 22 and 32. More than half of them financed their education through student loans, and many say the if they had $10,000 the “first thing” they’d do is pay down their student loan or credit card debt.
That’s no surprise when you consider student borrowing topped the $100 billion threshold for the first time in 2010, and total outstanding loans exceeded $1 trillion for the first time in 2011. Student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt in the U.S. which stands at about $798 billion.
The problem sometimes is that not all college educations are worth their cost since they can’t guarantee a high-paying job to help pay off that student debt. A report from the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys says the rising student debt problem can have a bad impact on the economy. Even in the best of economic times when jobs are plentiful, young people with considerable debt burdens end up delaying life-cycle events such as buying a car, purchasing a home, getting married and having children.
There’s nothing wrong with a good education in a trade school or community college.
The actual number for outstanding student loan debt is about $600 billion, and it’s gone up a lot under Obama.
Excerpt:
The outstanding balance for all of the direct student loans the federal government has issued topped $600 billion in April, according to newly released data from the U.S. Treasury.
The total balance hit $600.457 billion by the end of April, says the Treasury, up from $592.142 billion at the end of March.
The Federal Direct Student Loan Program already has built-in debt forgiveness plans for people who end up earning low incomes or for those who entered lines of work preferred by the government.
In January 2009, when Obama was inaugurated, the balance was $119.803 billion and has since increased more than fivefold.
The $480.654 billion increase since January 2009 in what is owed to the Treasury in direct student loans represents a climb of about 250 percent in just over four years.
Before Obama’s first term, federally guaranteed student loans were made both by the government directly and by private lenders using their own capital through what was called the Federal Family Education Loan program. Language inserted into the the Obamacare law signed in March 2010, however, abolished the latter type of federally guaranteed student loan, giving the U.S. Treasury a monopoly over those loans.
As the Congressional Research Service has described it, this Obamacare provision made the U.S. Treasury the exclusive “banker” for federally guaranteed student loans. Thus, U.S. taxpayers essentially own these loans.
The troubling thing is that since the schools have spent all the time teaching children about global warming and the proper use of contraceptives, it’s unlikely that they will be able to find real jobs in order to pay off their loans. They aren’t learning how to manage money in school, and parents aren’t taking the responsibility to teach kids about money at home. The sad thing is that they have been taught by their teachers to keep voting for more politicization of education and more government spending on fashionable causes. But at least they feel superior about it. For now.
WINTERY KNIGHT 