To higher education. No, really, I mean it. Under these circumstances, the single most revolutionary thing you can do is to opt out of the debt cycle they so desperately wish to trap us in. If I had kids who were college age, I’d encourage them to find ways to do it that did not incur massive amounts of debt (community college if you’re lucky enough to get in) — or tell them to skip it completely and learn a useful trade.
I value education for its own sake. But being trapped by a mountain of debt in order to get a degree in what is likely to be an entire decade of economic calamity just seems an unnecessary burden — since you’re unlikely to get a job that pays enough to pay back your loans, or to get any job at all.
speaking as someone in that kind of debt, i heartily concur.
i WISH I had gone to trade school, or apprenticed.
yes – or school out of the country
Definitely skip the for-profit universities and the expensive private schools, and don’t go to college right out of highschool just because your friends and peers are going (i.e. if you don’t know what you want to study or don’t know what kind of work you want to do, you won’t get much out of college and you probably won’t put much into it either). I dropped out and went back about 10 years later (doing the community college first to get all my prerequisites out of the way). You get so much more out of college when you have a little more wisdom and perspective on the world.
Of course, skipping college is also what the elites want us proles to do. Win-win for them either way.
The chairman of the largest mututal fund in the worlkd agrees with you, Susie:
http://www.pimco.com/EN/Insights/Pages/School-Daze-School-Daze-Good-Old-Golden-Rule-Days.aspx
Technical colleges aren’t that cheap. I know somebody who’s already in deep debt, and he’s just started on “real” college.
Being poor is being poor. Debt, no debt, the choices are pretty much the same.
YMMV.
this is another feature of the upper classes pushing everyone else down since the beginning of Reaganism and its cutting taxes ideology. Taxes were cut and support to public education has been reduced, including college tuition, or maybe especially college tuition, because, as they say, a degree is the ticket to upward class mobility. They don’t want upward class mobility; they want downward class mobility for everybody except themselves.
Anything extra the young graduate might gain with that diploma is paid back in terms of the tuition, fees and interest on loans. There is no net advancement, and in many cases not even the promised higher status job. Even the lawyers are complaining about the crappy jobs they are offered. ( Look at this for example: http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com ) My doctor was telling me that she had to take a second job working weekends at the local mental hospital to pay her loans.
Trapping the young middle class “worker” into debt is one more way of extracting whatever wealth this younger generation might acquire. This is the way the people on top live nowadays, by living parasitically on interest and rent, certainly not as muscular Randian inventors and builders of factories and railroads. But young people are not stupid and they are figuring out what is real.
If higher education is such a craptastic investment, why is the unemployment rate for college grads exactly half that of folks who don’t have a college degree? Guest has it right: skip the for-profit bucket shops and the private schools, and rediscover what a bargain public higher education really is. The tuition at my uni has held steady with the rate of inflation since 1980–what has changed is the drop in public support (federal and state) for higher education.
My 4-year university charged LESS THAN $7,000 last year for tuition for in-state undergraduate students. So why is it that these numbers never drive the debate in these “high cost of higher ed” stories? Oh, yeah: no one who writes for the Washington Post or the New York Times would dare send their children to a state school if they can help it. No, they want to write about the luxurious oppression of paying $45-$55K a year in tuition, room, board, and fees for an ivy-league degree these days.
This is a comment thread from http://www.alllnurses.com. Most of my ethics students are in the nursing program because it is one of the last areas to have jobs. There is supposed to be a shortage of nurses because of the boomers getting older. But there is a distinction to be made between a lot of people needing care and a lot of people being able to pay for care.
http://allnurses.com/graduate-nurse-forum/nursing-job-market-576431.html