woolymonkey (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
woolymonkey) wrote2011-05-06 09:48 am
woolymonkey) wrote2011-05-06 09:48 am
article about student debt in the US
A colleague posted this and I want to be able to find it again. I don't claim to be anything other than confused and worried about the way education and education funding is going in England and I have no idea whether this gives an accurate picture of the US situation. But as a parent and a uni tutor, I'm nervously trying to put it all together and figure out what the hell is going to come next...
Comments welcome but response may take the form of a monkey silently wringing her paws.
Comments welcome but response may take the form of a monkey silently wringing her paws.
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Student loans are a huge, huge problem! Enormous! I know people who have more than $100,000 in loans, and who will be paying them off until they're in their fifties or sixties.
The big issue at the bottom of it is private colleges and universities and how they market themselves. For example, Duke University, where my sister works.
Duke University and my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, are eight miles apart. Both are fine second tier schools, not Harvard, but easily in the top thirty nationwide. Both are reputable in the liberal arts, and both have fine law schools and medical schools. Duke University costs roughly $40,000 per year. UNC costs roughly $6,000 per year (in state). Duke is entirely funded by a private endowment worth nearly a billion dollars. UNC is funded by the North Carolina legislature and depends on the state budget every year.
Is Duke more than six times better than UNC? Not a chance. I knew many people who went to Duke and many to UNC, and twenty years after graduation there is no difference in their success. Both sets had an excellent education. So why does anyone go to Duke rather than UNC?
Marketing. Duke is sold as the finest money can buy, a real privilege to get in. It's the key to a quality life. A friend of mine who went to Duke at the same time I went to UNC explained that his parents (neither of whom had attended college) were told that he had achieved something amazing -- he had gotten into Duke. He had broken out of the box. He was destined for greatness. Their son (their son!) was uniquely talented and amazing, a once in a generation genius whose amazing gifts could only be nurtured by a Duke education which would catapult him in one step from the working class to the ranks of Steven Hawking and Einstein! How could they prevent him from achieving this destiny? Besides, it wouldn't cost them a thing. They wouldn't have to beggar themselves. Because Duke recognized their son's potential and believed in him so much, Duke would arrange all! The $60,000 (then) would be financed by deferred student loans payable over thirty years, surely a drop in the bucket even with 200% interest given the vast fortune a boy of his potential could be expected to amass in a few short years! And what seventeen year old boy doesn't like being told he'll be a huge success? And besides, what's paying something back in thirty years? He doesn't even have to start paying until a year after graduation, and that's like four years from now!
My sister got into both schools. But my parents were more savvy, having both gone to college and my grandparents being in education. My dad said she was going to UNC and he was paying the modest tuition out of pocket. (As he did with me, who only applied to UNC.) Now she works for Duke. Because when it comes to hiring, they didn't hire their own graduate in a creative department -- they hired UNC's.
In fact, both schools belong to a consortium, so that if you go to either and you want to take a class offered only at the other one you can do so. There's a bus that trundles the eight miles, free to students.
And yet every year parents shell out for Duke. No, students and parents take out enormous loans that cripple students for life with massive payments and huge amounts of interest, payments that defer buying houses, buying cars, having children. And very, very few graduates who don't already come from wealthy homes ever have the kind of income that will allow them to pay off the bills easily.
Because they weren't geniuses. They weren't the next Einstein. They were good kids with good grades. But Duke told their parents what they wanted to hear: your child is amazing and we'll do anything to help them because we want them to come here and make their unique genius a credit to our university.
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We believe so strongly that your son is a gift to humanity that we'll give him $5,000 a year just for being him! Before he goes to a single class or gets a single grade, we're so sure that he's amazing that we'll give him a scholarship of $20,000 (that's half an annual income for you working class parents) just for showing up! You just have to borrow the other $35,000 per year against his future earnings. And if you don't, you're throwing away a FREE $20,000 scholarship your son has earned with his potential to be the best of the best! Of course what this comes down to is Duke is "paying" Duke! It's a 12 1/2% discount to close the deal.
And the banks? They're for profit institutions. It's a good way to get 200% or more on their investment -- for thirty or forty years.
The problem is for profit colleges. They charge outrageously and earn huge profits. But as long as people are willing to pay for them, what can you do? If someone wants to spend their money stupidly....
I think the only way to stop it would be to make it illegal to lend the money to the student, to essentially give a huge loan to an eighteen year old with no income and no collateral. Unfortunately, what this would also do is kill the opportunity for kids from poor homes who honestly need to borrow the $6,000 for UNC.
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If you have time (which you probably don’t!), you could look at response I posted to one of Kari’s blogs (on women in HE?), which included stats that very much confirm everything your article says about the scandal of selling degree courses to children and parents as a financial investment. Especially to those considering humanities degrees (little extra earning potential), especially if you have boys (women get better earnings uplift from having a degree, so better to invest in daughters). The financial argument for going to uni is a tragic con trick for most – a way for employers to get skilled labour without investing their own cash in training them.
But three years away from home, focused on learning and growing (rather than wage slavery) is one of the best PERSONAL investments anyone could make in their lives – and I includes the ‘average ability’ students, not just the ‘gifted’. But how many young people contemplating uni truly value the experience, rather than the degree and the siren song of a ‘good job’?
I was lucky to enjoy four years of that experience (BA + masters), and for the rest of my days I’ll be grateful to every taxpayer out there who worked to give me that opportunity. At the time, admittedly, I was one of a tiny, privileged minority of the population, not the approx 50% hoping to go to uni today. But I’d vote in a trice for the chance to pay it on, even with the bigger numbers.