Defining
the Problem
If
you're a Baby Boomer, or the child or grandchild of Boomers, you know
the drill. From the day you begin seventh grade (sometimes earlier),
teachers, parents, guidance counsellors, magazine writers, and
assorted other adult pundits are—and have been since the first of
you entered the upper grades, around 1960—assaulting your ears with
“College! College! College!” You're told, or at least left
with the strong impression, that without it you'll inevitably be a
starving failure, and you begin to ask yourself, “If it's so
important, why isn't it compulsory and supported by taxes, like the
first twelve grades?” For middle- and upper-class youngsters at
least, it's taken for granted that you'll go—that you'll want
to go. But do you? Should you? In light of the current
headlines about college debt, let's look at some numbers.
According
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in October 2011, 68.3% of that
year's high-school graduates were enrolled in college, and overall
12,800,000 of 16-to-24's were there (33% more than were attending
high school). Yet seven months later, Travis Waldron on the website
ThinkProgress reported that only 56% of four-year-college students
graduate within six years, and only 29% of those in two-year programs
graduate in three. (As early as 20 years ago, only about 50% of
students entering four-year colleges got their diplomas within five.)
The Chronicle of Higher Education states that only 35% will
finish within the traditional four years. In 1970, 52% of all
high-school grads went straight to college (at least partly to avoid
the draft and Vietnam); in 1980, still c. 50% (over 30% of all
18-to-24's were in higher education that year); in 1997, 67%; in
2001, 62%. Yet in 2000, 30 years after the first of these entered,
15.5% of Americans had a B.A., 8.9% a postgrad degree; currently, 29%
hold some sort of “four-year” (or beyond) college diploma—which
doesn't seem like very much for the admissions figures, and isn't.
As long ago as 1984, only half of young people setting out to earn a
degree got it; today, only 46% of American students who start college
finish it (which means a small majority—54%—don't), and a third
of grads (15.3% of all entrants) take jobs that don't require a
degree, currently including 100,000+ janitors, 317,000 waitstaff,
365,000 cashiers, 12% of mail carriers, and 24.5% of retail
salespeople. Overall, 53% of B.A.'s under 25 are either unemployed
or underemployed. 35% of entrants drop out in their very first
year, and nearly half of community-college students do so. The
number-one reason cited by those who leave is finances (38%); another
21% say “burnout.” The cost of college has nearly sextupled
since 1985—at least partly, no doubt, as colleges scramble to
accommodate the hordes of students, which causes them to spend
prodigally on classrooms, dorms, teachers, and other services, but
partly too owing to the easy availability of loans—where medical
care rose only 350% in the same period, gasoline 300%, and consumer
items 210%. In 2002-12 it doubled, rising at more than three times
the general inflation rate. Of those who graduate, 38% have debt,
and in the next few years, projections show, approximately two-thirds
of all grads will, at an average amount of $40,000 (currently it
surpasses $25,000). Total student debt, held by 37,000,000
borrowers, surpassed $1 trillion in 2011 (since 1999 it has increased
over fivefold); only 39% of borrowers are actually paying down
balances, at least 14.5-25% are behind on their loans, and some
estimates give the default rate as one-third. 3,400,000 began to
make payments in 2007-9; in the same period, 238,000 (7% of that
figure) defaulted. As the average starter salary for “white-collar”
work is only $28,000/yr., the grad's debt will, in the very best-case
scenario, take 10-25 years to pay off. Horror stories abound, owing
largely to the very common custom of buying and selling student
paper: one protester at an Occupy Wall Street rally held a sign
declaring that he had borrowed $26,000 and after paying back $32,000
still owed $45,000—which meant his debt had increased by more than
three times the original principal. Another had $80,000 in debt.
Wrote a third:
My loans have been bought and sold so many times it is impossible to keep track of changes in rates, balances and terms of service...Eventually, I was able to consolidate the loans with Sallie Mae at a 7% interest rate. My loan payments have ranged from $400-600/mo. depending on the loan provider and lowest possible payment option available.
...I am currently a public school teacher with an income of $50,000, barely enough to pay the interest-only payments. I have never missed a payment in over ten years...and my loan balance [still] stands at $105,000. To date, I have paid over $40,000 in loan payments and because my income restricts me to interest-only payments, and the 7% daily capitalized interest rate, I now owe $15,000 more than I borrowed....
My student loan situation has nothing to do with a lack of financial responsibility.
...I have paid off $20,000 in credit card debt and a $10,000 car loan since graduation. I have no mortgage or any other outstanding debt, just my student loans. I have a credit score of 820. However, because of the usurious interest rates, capitalization of interest and the sole option of interest-only payments, I will never be able to pay off my student loan.
It’s just not possible, unless I win the lottery."
(For
more about student debt, search for “See How Cheap Loans May Hurt
Students,” at http://money.msn.com,
“Proprietary Colleges and Government Loans” at
http://themoderatevoice.com,
and “The Student Loan 'Debt Bomb'” at http://nacba.org.)
It's not hard to see why 1,000,000-1,600,000 otherwise qualified
young people every year simply decline to attend due to financial
constraints or concerns.
In
other developed nations the picture is quite different. Throughout
Europe, not only are college costs much lower than they are here (the
maximum anuual tuition in English universities is $14,000, and that
at elite Canadian ones is even less—$6000!) , but a test-based
meritocratic system, such as the British A-level tests, is used to
put secondary students through greater filters than American ones
encounter. A “gap year” (sometimes more than one)—a period
during which the young person works, travels, and generally gets to
know himself, developing a picture of what he wants (and is suited)
to do with his life before plunging into “higher education”—is
a common phenomenon. Yet overall 30% of Europeans have degrees, a
figure marginally higher than that of Americans. In Germany, to take
a typical example, 97% of students graduate from high school, but
only a third of them go on to college—and almost none drop out of
it, because those who are admitted, through the screening process,
have been found to be truly capable of college work. The rest enter
training and apprenticeship programs, many of which begin during high
school. By the time they finish, they've had a far better practical
education than most American students—equivalent to an American
technical degree—and so have an easier time entering the workforce.
Similarly, in Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, and
Switzerland, 40-70% of all students opt for an educational program
that combines classroom and workplace learning. Rather than spending
money on community college courses intended for “developmental”
or “transfer education” or a bachelor's degree they aren't sure
what to do with, they can learn hard skills that prepare them for
employment. Meanwhile, those who hold diplomas are generally able to
find work suited to their educations because there's no glut of
emerging graduates, and the workplace, owing to ordinary attrition,
has enough “college-level” slots to absorb them: one never hears
of a French or German B.A. working as a barista in Starbuck's! And
who would suggest that—until the recession went worldwide—Europe
lacked a functioning economy?
As
with many of our other current woes, notably the mortgage bubble,
it's worth taking a look back and getting an understanding of how we
got here. Before 1900, only about 1% of “college-age” young
people actually went on to college. In 1925 only a quarter of the
population had graduated from high school or college, and 8% of
18-to-21-year-olds were attending the latter, although the popular
culture probably made it seem like more, the “collegiate” image
being pervasive. This figure nearly doubled by 1940, mostly
involving middle-class students attending non-elite public
universities; yet even then, costs were low, pressures were less
intense, and it wasn't hard for a young man to carry a full
courseload, work a full-time job (or two or three part-time ones—the
fellow “working his way through college” by selling something
door-to-door was so common as to be fodder for songs and jokes), and
play on the football team besides. No loans were necessary: if Dad
couldn't afford to send you, you could finance yourself, cash on the
barrelhead—and indeed make yourself, perhaps, more attractive to
employers, who would see you, not unreasonably, as mature, focused,
and hard-working. Then came the GI Bill. By the time the
eligibility period for it ended in 1956, out of a total of some
15,294,000 ex-servicemen, roughly 2,200,000 had used
its education benefits to attend colleges or universities, while
another 5,600,000-6,600,000 (depending on the source you read)
employed them for some other kind of training program. At some
schools vets made up as much as 40% of the student body. At the same
time, the “Greatest Generation,” as Tom Brokaw famously
named it, was the last generation of American men to reach the top
without the benefit of wholesale higher education; even those who
didn't take advantage of the Bill (43.5-49%) generally managed to do
well economically without a lot of preparation on their part, simply
by being in the right place at the right time. A booming economy,
low-cost home and small-business loans from a grateful government,
and the loss of so many of their contemporaries, which made for more
job slots than warm bodies to fill them, virtually guaranteed their
success.
Having
seen the undisputed successes of the GI Bill grads, it was inevitable
(given the often excessive enthusiasm typical of the American
character) that we would quickly move from thinking “All young
people can go to college (because these young men, many of
them working class, succeeded there)” to “All young people should
go to college.” And with the commencement of the Cold War and
especially the Space Race, becoming highly educated became
patriotic—a duty of sorts. Yet the vets' successes—which were
creditable, as noted, at least in part to the times during which they
entered the workforce—could be traced to other things too. Most,
by the time they entered the program, were 20 years old or beyond.
Many were married, and quite a few had children,
which made them highly motivated. Since, as the saying is,
war is 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror, they'd had leisure in which
to reflect on what they wanted out of life, what they dreamed of
doing, and what their innate gifts might be. (If 17- and
18-year-olds knew what they wanted to do, college students
wouldn't switch their majors as often as they do.) They had also
been through a sobering experience such as no high-school kid has.
They had travelled and seen something of the world, or at least of
their own country beyond their home towns or city neighborhoods. Of
them, as of their fathers who had fought the “Great War,” it
could aptly be sung, “How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm,/After
they've seen Paree?”
In 1967, private college fees averaged $2000 a year (public ones of course charged less); in 1970, even in the Ivy League, still only $3000; and college costs rose with (not ahead of) the oil inflation of 1973-5. But by 1980, as the youngest of the Boomers were beginning to enter, they were up to $10,000, and after that, the deluge: by 1981, costs were rising at about 10% per year, which was twice the rate of inflation, and they continued to double the inflation rate almost every year of the decade. By the mid-'80's, private college tuition was $12,000 a year; by1989, $20,000; and for the academic year of 1993-4, total costs averaged $25,000. In the '60's, it was mostly parents who paid for their kids' tuition, or else they took out loans. In 1965, President Johnson began the GSL program, meant to be a little stopgap for lower-income families; you had to be earning less than $12,000 a year (over $82,000 in 2010 dollars!) before you even qualified. By 1977, only 6,000,000 students had taken advantage of the program, borrowing around $10,000,000,000—around $1666 per. 80% of all government college assistance still took the form of grants and work-study; only 20% was loans, which still had requirements many would-be students couldn't meet. Then, in 1978, President Jimmy Carter changed the eligibility rules. By the mid-'80's, loans were available for almost everyone. The student himself took out the loan, agreeing to begin paying it back six months after graduation. In addition, more kids were working part-time to get their extra bread together—in 1986, more than half of all students, of whom over half in turn were working more than 25 hours a week. This meant it took longer to get through: by 1987 the average student took just over five years to earn his degree. And costs kept going up. In 1970, a new Ford Mustang cost about $2721—only a little less than a year of college. If it had kept pace with tuition, in 1993 it would have been priced at $22,635. But it wasn't: it was a nice $11,000 car. Today, the MSRP of a new 2011 model is $21,245 before you start dickering; the average annual cost of tuition and expenses at a private non-profit four-year college is $35,000, some 57% of which goes for tuition. (At public colleges it runs just under 40% of that—which, over four years, is still $56,000, a significant figure.) In 1992 variable interest rates were introduced—a recipe for disaster, as anyone knows who has ever faced a balloon payment on his house. In the mid-'90's more programs emerged and requirements eased again. The overwhelming majority of college loans ($650 billion of $845 outstanding, or 76.9%) are now Federal. Until 1976, all student loans could be discharged through bankruptcy (though less than 1% ever were), and in 1976-98 Federal loans could still be so vacated after five years. Since then these have been undischargeable, and in 2005 private ones became nearly so. The result is that in a fragile economy, with jobs limited and “college-level” ones even more so, millions of young people are burdened with loans they can never repudiate and may never be able to repay; even if they do, the obligation is so crushing that they have no option but to put off investing, buying homes or new (as opposed to second- and thirdhand) cars, starting families or small businesses of their own, and concentrate solely on surviving and servicing their debt. Is this what the economy needs? Is it what you, the would-be student or her parents, want?
What
can we do?
No
one denies that some sort of post-secondary training is now vital. A
high-school diploma today is actually worth less than a sixth-grade
education was in the 19th century, when the latter
qualified a person for most available jobs, and even many a Robber
Baron started out with no more (or even less) and amassed a huge
fortune through good luck, hard work, more than a little
ruthlessness, and a shrewd sense of what the country needed. Yet the
term “post-secondary training” embraces a broad spectrum of
options, and even professional educators are now suggesting that, for
many young people, something other than college may be the answer—a
message that doesn't seem to have reached them, or their parents,
yet. There's apprenticeship and on-the-job training (which allow you
to earn while you learn); the military, with its large slate of
technical specialties; one-year vocational certificate programs and
associate degrees; career technical education at community colleges,
led into by career-prep tracks at the high-school level; specialized
training programs and schools that teach useful work (beautician,
semi-truck driver). And then there are the other possibilities:
self-employment or entrepreneurship; franchising and free-lancing.
It's
unfortunately true that the classic American social resentment toward
the gifted, stemming from a basic aversion to the concept that some
children may be better or smarter than others, causes many of us to
balk at the idea of “tracking:” if all animals are equal, how can
some be more (or less) equal than others? Yet meritocracy is also a
strongly held American ideal: Thomas Jefferson, while repudiating the
concept of a class of humanity “born booted and spurred” to ride
the rest, strongly supported that of a “natural aristocracy” from
which the country's leaders should come. At the same time, 95% of
the population falls within an IQ range of 70-130 (which means that
an 18-year-old may have a mental age of anywhere from 12.6 to 23.4),
and 60% within the 85-115 bracket (15.3-20.7). The brutal fact is
that all of us are not
created equal, and
what the Founding Fathers probably meant when they declared we were
was that we should all have equal status before the law and an equal
opportunity (questions of race, religion, and the like
notwithstanding) to make
the best of our innate talents—in
other words, the Level Playing Field. If every youngster were suited
for college, would so many of them pay hundreds or thousands of
dollars for SAT coaching? Far more sensible to divide our secondary
schools into three tracks: academic or Honors, for those who want
careful preparation for the intellectual demands of college;
vocational, for those who prefer marketable skills that can translate
to a job as soon as they leave (or, at least, after a year or two of
training); and mid-range, for those who want respectable but untaxing
courses that will assure entry into two-year or modest four-year
colleges (or perhaps into business environments) along with some
experience with hands-on, reality-based job experiences.
In
2002, the BLS estimated that 70% of all jobs in the decade 2000-10
would require no college degree, and it seems likely that the same is
true 10 years on: computers may have changed the way of life for most
Americans, but it still takes a skilled pair of hands to rebuild a
carburetor; the health-care field may be the fastest-growing in the
country, but doctors and nurses can't work in a hospital unless
there's someone around to build it; cities need people to chase
criminals and fight fires and man the windows at City Hall, utility
companies need people to lay water-mains and string wire (or to make
repairs at need), and just about everyone needs truck drivers to
deliver the goods they sell or the equipment they require to carry
out their mandate. There will always be a need for people who can
make, sell, or repair things: people to sell shoes and insurance and
auto parts, to stock shelves and man cash registers (or the
customer-service desk) in supermarkets, to re-shingle roofs, hang
kitchen cabinets, install drywall and lay tile, exterminate
pestiferous insects or harmlessly remove nuisance animals, fix stoves
and washing machines, air conditioners and furnaces; for butchers,
bakers, pharmacists, plumbers, electricians, and carpenters—and any
of these jobs can lead to ownership, or at least management, of one's
own facility in time. The same is true of the restaurant trades, in
all degrees of fanciness: many a youngster who begins by flipping
burgers in a fast-food joint can rise to be a store manager or even a
franchisee, if he's willing to stick with it for the long haul.
Lengthened lifespans create a need for people who can help with
housework, lawn care, and the like, supply rides to the doctor, and
run errands for seniors who retain their mental capacities but can no
longer deal with certain physical demands; two-income and
single-parent families often pay well to have personal shopping done
by people who drive, or to get in-home child care or
once-or-twice-a-week housekeeping. While factory flight has weakened
unions and eliminated many blue-collar jobs, many others, which have
to be done on the spot, still exist and can pay as much as, or more
than, white-collar ones—a pipefitter in Northeast Pennsylvania can
earn a cool $40,698/yr., which places him solidly in the middle class
(generally reckoned at $25,000-$100,000); and though much factory
assembly (think cars) is now done by “robots,” somebody has to be
able to repair those robots when they go out of order. A
browse through the Occupational
Outlook Handbook (found
in most libraries) will reveal hundreds of other useful, well-paying,
respectable kinds of work unlikely to be exported to Mexico or the
Pacific Rim.
Of
course we should be reforming our high schools—not only wiring them
for the Internet, but reinstituting some kind of tracking system
(based not on income or color but on interest and ability),
encouraging young people to take courses suited to them, and
reintroducing those courses if they've been eliminated (quick, how
many readers remember AutoShop? WoodShop? Mechanical Drawing?). We
should be making all school instruction more individualized, rather
than sticking with the “one-size-fits-all” model that we've been
using since the days of the Little Red Schoolhouse, while at the same
time making sure that each student can do the work—read, write,
think clearly, concentrate on his task—before he leaves the grade
(far too many young people today enter college with writing and math
skills inadequate to it). We need to provide opportunities to all
kinds of learners, not just traditional academic/classroom learners,
and eliminate “required” courses in favor of more individualized
schedules. We should also be spending less time on propagandizing
students and their parents into thinking that four or more years of
college is a guarantee of “a good job;” doubtless it was c.
1950-80, but as long ago as 25-30 years that was no longer true, and
underemployment of college grads was becoming depressingly common.
Since it should be transparently clear, if you think about it, that a
person doing something she loves will do well at it, be well-adjusted
and less likely to stress out, and probably garner positive
recognition from her employer, we need to stop thinking that
“success” or “a good job” is defined by its prestige, what
you wear to do it, or even what you earn at it, instead of by whether
it makes you happy, uses your natural talents, and pays you enough to
live on comfortably, according to your definition of comfort.
(Parents, this means you!) We need to convince business
leaders—perhaps by offering long-term tax breaks to those willing
to try it—that actual ability and innate suitability (not a degree)
should be the criteria for hiring, and that practical experience and
the gradual promotion from within of hard-working, enthusiastic
employees who know the company in a real-world way is far preferable
to filling executive suites with “corporate raiders” whose only
loyalty is to themselves or twenty- and thirtysomethings with
new-minted MBA's who know nothing more about business-in-general than
what they've read in books (which, I'm convinced, is why Circuit City
and Borders, to give two recent examples, are now resting with the
dinosaurs). We need to do something drastic (severe tax penalties? a
cap on executive pay?) about the increasing tendency of employers to
fill white-collar jobs (not merely “college-level” ones, but
those that can be held by anyone with a one- or two-year
post-secondary degree) by outsourcing, part-timing, and temps. We
need to revive the American manufacturing base—no economy can be
run solely on services: the day of vast corporate plants may be gone,
but we can still encourage small and medium-sized facilities, owned
by local families and stockholders, that pay good wages and provide
secure jobs for the many people who simply aren't suited for an
academic or office life. We need to either institute a
European-style test-filter system or require colleges to emplace more
stringent entrance requirements. We need to forbid the buying and
selling of student loans, if not to limit their repayment to a set
percentage of one's net (not gross) income, and to restrict the
compounding of their interest to, at most, quarterly (annually would
be better).
As
for today's youngsters, to them I would say this: All teens—all
human beings!—shine in their own particular areas, a phenomenon
neatly explained by Howard Gardner's theory of multiple
intelligences: people excel in the area of their dominant and most
natural intelligence. (Or, to put it more bluntly, everyone is great
in at least one thing and stinks in at least one thing.) Find yours.
Read such books as Harlow G. Unger's But
What If I Don't Want to Go to College?,
Linda Lee's Success
Without College,
Danielle Kwatinetz Wood's The
UnCollege Alternative, Michael
Farr's 300 Best
Jobs Without a Four-Year
Degree, Heather
Z. Hutchins's I
Don't Want to Go to College,
Marsha Sinetar's Do
What You Love, the Money Will
Follow,
Po Bronson's What
Should I Do With My Life?, Shoya
Zichy's Career
Match: Connecting
Who You Are
With What You'll Love to Do, and
especially John Keats's (no, not that
Keats) old but still very relevant The
Sheepskin Pyschosis.
(Plugging these titles into Amazon will bring up many similar ones.)
Take aptitude and personality tests—one or two of each a year, or
even more, from the time you turn 12 or 13 (you can find many
online); by the time you're 16 or 17 (if you keep a record of your
results) you should be able to discern a pattern that will reveal
your special talents, interests, and passions. Take them to your
guidance counsellor and ask for help discovering how they can be
turned into a living. Take some time to consider what's important to
you (this is where a European “gap year” can be particularly
valuable). Do you want to travel, or stay in one place? Do you feel
a need to keep up with the Joneses, or tell them to go jump in the
lake? Do you want to get married some day? Have kids? What kind of
home do you want? What kind of neighborhood, climate, and so on
would you like to live in? What gadgets, amenities, etc., can you
not live without? All these questions can help you determine how
much net income you'll need. Then visit
http://www.yourmoneypage.com/withhold/fedwh1.php,
which provides calculators for both Federal and state withholdings,
and you'll know how much annual gross you have to look for.
Don't
assume that Corporate America is the only way to go. Small
businesses have classically been the backbone of the economy and
remain so even today. If you love good food, for example, go to work
for a caterer or a specialty deli or baker, learn the business from
the bottom up, put aside 25-50% of the money you would have spent
servicing a loan, and maybe take a couple of business-math or
accounting courses on the side, then open a gourmet shop or other
foodie business of your own. If you're a book nut or a music maven,
find a book or music store that needs an enthusiastic young worker
and do the same thing; if you're into stylish clothes, a boutique or
haberdashery; if pets, a breeder or a pet store. It's entirely
possible, especially if you're willing to free-lance in high school,
to turn a hobby into a business—taking photographs of specialty
subjects, raising pedigreed pets, catering for small parties,
managing weddings or coming-out parties, tutoring in bridge or music
or foreign languages. Network through your parents' friends and your
relatives and neighbors, put up signs on local bulletin boards, even
advertise in your hometown paper or in specialty publications if you
can afford it. Consider the military (the GI Bill still beckons) or
the Civil Service exam (any GS-9 can work his way up the ladder under
the merit system). Or, if you like to work with your hands, a
skilled trade. Look into franchising or other enterpreneurships; if
you can save the money or get the adults in your life to advance it,
you can be owning your own business before you're old enough to
drink—and it probably won't cost any more than college would have.
Especially if your gift is creative or artistic, such as writing or
the theater, you may be better off just starting out as an editorial
assistant or doing set design or publicity for theaters and working
your way up to whatever level best employs your talents. (And if you
want to write, write!
Start now and submit, submit, submit. The same if you paint, or
draw, or sculpt. If you act, start in summer stock or long-wharf
theater, or in amateur community groups while you work a “real”
job for your rent and food; study the methods of the older actors you
admire, and ask if they'll mentor you.) If a conventional business
career—a corporate executive position instead of independent
ownership—is your goal, rather than getting a headful of theory at
college, go back to the tried and true process of Great-Granddad's
day and before: start out with part-time and summer jobs in the field
of your choice, take a few specialized courses after high school, and
begin on the selling or manufacturing floor or in the mailroom. You
won't be doing any worse financially than you would if you were
trying to pay off four, six, eight, or more years' worth of student
debt, and while it may take you 40 years to reach that corner office,
when you do you'll know that business inside out and upside
down—which will make your company more competitive.
And
if you must go
to college—which you should probably do only if you (1) have at
least a B average/are in the top 15% of your class (depending on the
rigorousness of your particular school) or have an IQ of 105 or
better (many very intelligent people underachieve in high school out
of boredom, and college admissions officers know this; and while IQ
tests measure only verbal and mathematical reasoning and the ability
to recall—not the myriad other kinds of intelligence—the fact is
that in an academic setting these are the ones that matter); (2) are
either generally intellectually curious or want to go into some line
that requires extensive specialized training, such as law, medicine,
teaching, engineering, architecture, librarianship, social work, the
clergy, etc.; and (3), most important, are personally
(not societally or parentally) motivated—choose your college with
care. Don't just think in terms of “prestige.” There are so
many schools in the US that patient and careful research is sure to
uncover several suited to your personality and aspirations. Look
through the shelves in your high-school library or at your local
bookstore for volumes that offer information on student life and
local environment as well as entrance requirements and available
courses. Consult such websites as http://www.degreepath.com.
Research grants, scholarships, work-study programs, anything that
doesn't have to be paid back. If it takes you six years to get
through, you'll certainly be in good company, as the statistics above
show—and with 40-plus years of working life before you, isn't it
better to start out debt-free and with training that qualifies you to
do something you can at least tolerate? (Mark Slackmeyer's father in
Doonesbury
to the contrary—“I hate my job...and someday you'll hate your job
too. That's normal,
dammit!”—you
don't have
to grind your life out at work that kills your spirit.) Ideally,
spend your first couple of years at a junior or community college
within commuting distance of your home rather than wasting them at
“required” (which mostly means remedial) courses at a four-year
institution, then transfer for your latter years. Meanwhile, visit
http://www.signon.org and search
for “Support the Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012.” If it
doesn't pass, wait till after the elections, then start bombarding
your Congresspeople with calls and e-mails supporting a new version
of it, and urge your friends, from next door to Facebook, to go and
do likewise. Visit sites like http://www.studentloanjustice.org
and http://www.forgivestudentloandebt.com
to find out more about efforts to relieve the debt picture.
American
ingenuity and dedication have done great things for this country in
its 200-odd years of existence. I'm convinced that by a combination
of more of the same with common sense and a partial return to
time-tested methods, we can end the student-debt crisis and create a
much happier and more productive workforce.
********************************************************************************
Chrijeff
is a Baby Boomer (b. 1950) who never went to college (“most of what
I really use and am interested in I've clawed out for myself”) but
says she needs only “a modest bungalow or double-wide of my own”
and a dependable $500 more per month to be quite content with her
lot. She lives outside of Scranton, PA, and freelances as a writer,
editor, researcher, critic, and Webmistress, besides huckstering
books, music, and videos online.
