College continues to get more expensive:
The near doubling in the cost of a college degree the past decade has produced an explosion in high-priced student loans that could haunt the U.S. economy for years.
While scholarship, grant money and government-backed student loans -- whose interest rates are capped -- have taken up some of the slack, many families and individual students have turned to private loans, which carry fees and interest rates that are often variable and up to 20 percent.
Many in the next generation of workers will be so debt-burdened they will have to delay home purchases, limit vacations, even eat out less to pay loans off on time.
Kristin Cole, 30, who graduated from Michigan State University's law school and lives in Grand Rapids, Mich., owes $150,000 in private and government-backed student loans. Her monthly payment of $660, which consumes a quarter of her take-home pay, is scheduled to jump to $800 in a year or so, confronting her with stark financial choices.
There are a lot of things that are just wrong with this. First of all, there is no non-technical education worth $150,000USD at the current value of the US Dollar. This is especially true of liberal arts programs and law school. Think about this, for a second. Why on Earth should someone have to pay $150,000 or more for an education that consists primarily of reading and analyzing books? Even more relevant, would someone pay that much for an education that they could just as easily get from spending 5-6 hours a day, every work day, at a public library?
What Cole and others aren't asking is why you even need to have a law school education to become a lawyer. Why isn't passing the bar exam enough to do it? The obvious answer is that that would be too meritocratic, and would open the door to more talented people who have their primary education in other fields, and who study law for other reasons. It would also make it so that spending $100,000-$200,000 on a law school education in your early twenties would seem about as bright a move as buying a mid-range Italian sports car in your early twenties when you don't have the money or job to support it.
Are college educations even really needed for most jobs today? I seriously doubt it, personally. There are very few professions where you need the sort of educational rigor that a university can provide. In fact, in many cases, it's just a way of weeding out socio-economic undesirables from some positions, and in other cases, making it easier for Human Resources to scan resumes. Hell, I don't even need a college degree to do what I do for a living! I have used barely any of the upper-level Computer Science classes that I took. Everything that I have used to write software at work has consisted of a basic, but solid, understanding of Java or Jython programming, some database development information, and some of the 200 level course work that covered recursive algorithms. In other words, by the end of my sophomore year, I no longer needed to continue on with my CS education to be able to do what I would end up doing 2.5 years later! I would thus submit that most jobs that are less technical than mine can be accomplished by a young and eager-to-learn employee with no college education at all, provided that they get on the job training.
I'm not surprised to see that the article didn't even get into the issue of having employers pay for advanced degrees. I sure as hell won't be paying for my master's degree if and when I can go for one at a state university. Rather, my employer will be picking up at a bare minimum a significant chunk of the tuition. In exchange for being locked into working for them an extra year after graduation, I will have paid almost nothing for my master's degree.
"I could never buy a house. I can't travel; I can't do anything," she said. "I feel like a prisoner."
A legal aid worker, Cole said she may need to get a job at a law firm, "doing something that I'm not real dedicated to, just for the sake of being able to live."
Boo hoo. God forbid that you have to work at a place that will probably give you a significant pay increase, thus giving you the freedom to buy a house, travel and do many of the things you want in exchange for not saving the world. Such a modern day tragedy it is to have to go to work for someone who will pay you more to work for them in the same profession, when many others are having to take pay cuts.
It doesn't even seem to cross her mind that working for a private law firm might actually give her the opportunity to make a real difference. She has just as much opportunity, if not more, to take on good cases where valuable precedents can be set, and if she gets employed by a law firm that is generally inclined toward her worldview, she might have some powerful backing to take on cases that would otherwise have been inaccessible to her.
There are two reasons why I am debt-free from college. The first reason is that my family started saving when I was very little, so they had about eighteen years to prepare slowly. I fully intend to do this for my kids, so tuition costs don't make me have to work a second job. Second, I chose a cheaper, state university, James Madison University, over more expensive and prestigious ones. It still blows my mind to think that people will pay as much as $50,000 a year for an undergraduate education that can had for as little as $2,800/semester at a state university.
I'm not entirely unsympathetic to some of these people. A lot of universities blow money on stupid, useless things. There is a lot of room for them to tighten their belts and reduce costs. Still, you cannot end up with a mortgage-sized college debt by accident. It is entirely possible to work around that at a young age. Just go into the military for four years, live on base, use your other stipends to your advantage, and save every paycheck. Between that and the GI Bill, you can easily afford to have as much as $100,000 saved up by the time you're out. I know that is possible because a friend of mine has been doing that while he plans to go to medical school on the military's dime. Even now, there are good options which don't involve mortgage-sized debts.