Yes, one does need to transfer to a 4 year school to finish but taking the bulk of the expense out of the first two years helps.

While some state colleges and universities have gone up in price, they’re no where near as expensive as private colleges.

My point is simple and holds: the price of a college education should figure into the decision of where one wants to go, not just the fact that one got into one’s first choice which might be a private and expensive school.

There are ways to go to college with less or no debt.

We now have an entire generation of people who, when faced with the choice of:

1. go to community college, assume no debt

2. go to a state university (your state), assume less debt

3. go to an expensive college or university, assume debt

Chose #3 with the idea that the degree from the expensive school would be worth more.

People who chose and continue to choose to go into debt to finance what might have been a free education are taking a calculated risk that the degree from the fancier school will get them a better job which in turn will allow them to pay off the debt faster (and eventually they’ll make more money).

I think all of this is just fine. What isn’t just fine is asking for this debt, assumed under these conditions, to be forgiven. This to me smacks of moral hazard and it makes light of the fact that some students faced with the same choices chose colleges or universities that didn’t saddle them with debt.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/05/16/ncaa

http://occupywallst.org/

…I plan on stopping payment on my note immediately. I have no assets you can seize; I have no wages you can garnish; have fun Mr. Bank Assholes.

How were you planning on dealing with the ‘starving to death’ problem inherent in that scenario? Or was that part of the plan?

http://madisonwi.livejournal.com/2266467.html

Why is it that nobody ever talks about the cost of housing around major campus’s?  I’m a grad student and at $800/mo for rent (if you live close to campus that won’t even buy you your own room), which is pretty typical in my area, I end up paying as much for housing as I would pay in tuition, if I weren’t employed by the University.

Probably, because like all cost-of-living issues, it varies widely with location. In my college town $650/mo will get you ‘two bedroom, all utilities, off street parking, walking distance to campus.’ Can hit less than $300 if you share with someone.  In fact, one area near the med campus is colloquially referred to as ‘the white coat ghetto’ for its low income, low rent, and high student population. I think even if we ‘fix’ higher education, there will still be some schools which are more expensive than others, just as if we ‘fix’ the housing market it is still going to be way more expensive to live in a city of 8 million (eg, New York)  than in a city of 300 thousand (my college town).

I’m glad you found employment with the University. I wasn’t aware that _any_ US schools provided housing for grad students!

I guess the fact that its all tied up in a larger housing market, people just sort of accept it.

THE RENT IS TOO DAMN HIGH.  I NEED TO EAT BREAKFAST LUNCH AND DINNER!

I think that like most complicated issues, the question of fairness towards students gets horribly oversimplified.  We all want to point the finger at someone, and lately the biggest demon is high tuition and student loans, with a side of corporate university culture.  Yes, at some schools tuition is outrageously expensive, but it’s a mystery to me why these schools are attended by students who aren’t fabulously wealthy.  Go to a state school!  And if no one wants you enough to make school affordable – guess what? You’re being used! Then you have to decide if the financial burden is worth the benefits of the education.  That’s a personal decision because learning is valuable by itself, but on a financial level it’s questionable.

I think if you take a step back, you can see that the whole system is mutually exploitative, and no individual level (student, professor, administrator, government) has the willpower to make seismic change.  Students have demanded universal financial aid and access to education, which are noble ideals, but now an undergraduate degree is basically meaningless as a credential, and they readily accept crippling loans without considering their long-term impact.  Universities recruit students very aggressively, especially for graduate school, with no regard for their students’ job prospects.  Universities have also turned into corporate-structured profit machines, replacing the majority of their full-time labour with adjunct/TA wage-slaves. 

And finally, the government either lacks the willpower or the moral sense to meaningfully reform the cost of education, hence the growing gap between rising tuition and stagnant aid.  In short, there is no such thing as cheaper tuition – just higher or lower subsidy, and for all our talk about universality, as a public we can’t face the music that cheaper education means higher government spending.

Ever heard that old truism before?

Why not put it into practice?

The student loan system is horrible and corrupt. If an 18 year old is not old enough to be trusted to buy liquor, they certainly aren’t old enough to sign themselves up for a lifetime of debt slavery. 

Some resourceful Happy Mutant ought to start a pledge webpage:

“I recognize that the current student loan system is usurious, abusive, deceptive, and preys on minors. As I have more than $25,000 on debt, debt I was misled into accepting by the lie of increased marketability in the workplace, I plan on stopping payment on my note immediately. I have no assets you can seize; I have no wages you can garnish; have fun Mr. Bank Assholes. I invite all of my friends in similar situations to do they same; hopefully millions will sign on.”

Get a million people to sign that, and take that action..and, considering that the student loan debt load is larger than all credit cards combined..you might just bring the whole financial system crashing to a halt.

I just say this because your comment (and the article) display an economic ignorance. Government has played a key role in the problem. Student aid increases demand, which rises prices. When this is paired with usurious and absurd laws about non-dischargability, it turns into a fascist model of corporate-state partnership, designed to lock young students into fearful wage slavery for life.

Increasing student aid in the form of loans is cruel and tortuous.

Increasing grants, or free tuition, while still economically debatable, is much better.

But the current system cannot be blamed on the free market. For one, there is no free market in education – schools more or less have to be state certified; a massive reduction in supply and choice, and a massive barrier to entry. For another, while the shift towards loans and debt has been awful, government has had it’s hands all over the whole system. Reduce supply and increase demand and yes, you will see higher prices.

Just as in many other crucial areas of society that are totally broken – financial markets, health care, etc. – the culprit is private greed combined with misguided government largess and intervention.

The best of all is to scrap the whole college system. It was a child of a pre-digital era. Certainly, some fields need colleges..but most don’t. College should be replaced by distributed and non-hierarchical systems of learning. The ‘degree’ from college should be replaced with a rigorous and difficult series of exams to demonstrate mastery of a subject, hard enough to challenge a professor, along with apprenticeships and work-study partnerships in companies.

For millions of young people, college has become an extended busy-work session.

None of that experience mattered as much as a degree from [crappy college here]. And it was even harder because my degree was in… diesel technology. I had a decade as a mechanic. Taught myself computer programming and UNIX system administration while fixing buses on second shift.

But none of that mattered. The only place that would hire me was a little two-man shop. For not much more than I was making as a mechanic.

So, do I get f**ked over by yet another for-profit college? Get a worthless degree? I have talked to, and interviewed, people who went to the diploma mills, and I will be quite thorough in investigating their skills. Because they have a reputation for turning out degreed candidates who don’t know a goddamn thing. Who are really, really proud of doing the kind of coding projects I was doing in middle school, and boasting about it like they’re some kind of frigging genius.

These for-profit colleges set expectations way too high, and then the students find out they’re in $40k worth of debt for a degree that isn’t worth a thing in the market. I’d rather hire someone who has no degree than someone who got suckered by those places – it shows they can do research before making a decision.

Median adult income (at least in the States) is something like $28k. $37k is by no means rich, and by no means what field workers make.

Most are in default, their debts are growing (in fact, multiplying) despite them making payments, and several have struggled with thoughts of suicide because they know that if they don’t come up with a lot of money, very fast, then the rest of their lives will be spent working just so they can continue paying off their loan debts… at least until they die, at which point the debts will be passed on to whoever cosigned. In fact, this is what stayed one of them from going through with it: even if they killed themself the debt wouldn’t go away, they’d just be passing it on to their family members who cosigned.

If I could get my hands on any of the people who constructed the system to create this new generation of indentured servitude, I guarantee you I’d spend the rest of my life in prison for what I’d do to them, and not regret it once.

i retired from the company to further my Economics education, so i went back to school full time, as part of my experiment i have 40,000 + in debt,  ask me if i’m worried, yeah student loan debt cannot be discharged(it can) but i fully expect to repay it with interest, when i hit 65 or 72,   yeah i plan to repay the loan  that way.

or i could get a job type job and repay quicker, i hear mcdonalds employess are making bank.

If capital is highly concentrated, then the (relative) benefits of commanding that capital are great, so many people would want it, but few people could be granted access to it. For the structure to maintain itself, some filter system would need to be set up. As someone who did a middling undergrad degree and a top-flight graduate one, I truly believe that this filter is currently the university system.

The difference in opportunities offered is stark, but for no good reason. The jobs that are filled with, say Harvard MBAs, do not actually need/use most of what is taught in such programmes. They just need a small pre-filtered pool of applicants to consider for the privileged positions. It’s inefficient, it’s unfair, and it dearly needs changing.