Why Johnny can’t pay his student loans

By PETER MORICI, UPI Outside View Commentator   |   May 1, 2012 at 6:30 AM   |   Comments

COLLEGE PARK, Md., May 1 (UPI) -- Young people face a cruel irony. Most can't land a decent job without a college education, yet many graduates are locked into poorly paying positions that don't permit repayment of student loans.

For two generations, college price tags have risen much faster than inflation and families' ability to pay. More importantly, costs have leaped faster than what graduates can earn over working lifetimes and many diplomas don't offer a positive return on investment, as measured by graduates' ability to service their debt.

Working professionals, including some lawyers, are moving in with older relatives -- they simply can't pay both rent and student loans.

Many never get out of debt. About 17 percent of delinquent student loans are owed by folks over the age of 50 and Americans over 60 owe $36 billion in unpaid loans. Too frequently, Social Security checks are garnished and debt collectors are harassing borrowers in their 80s.


Now, despite the fact that employers must often still train new hires, they require some college or even a diploma. Requiring some higher education may be an easy way of screening an applicant's native intelligence but many jobs simply don't pay enough for students to repay six-figure debts in a decade or so.

K-12 public education is partially to blame. During the late 1960s, a sense emerged that the performance of high schools had declined -- judging from the reasoning, English and math skills of college freshman, employers were probably right.

A few years of college became a proxy for employers that young applicants had what a decent high school diploma should guarantee but no longer did -- the ability to do more than read and add sums but also reason and string together four grammatically correct sentences into a coherent idea.

With half of the population headed to college, universities churned out too many graduates with little more than a general education -- the ability to think critically, write a composition and read poetry. Most college majors don't prepare graduates for much.

In recent decades, states cut aid to higher education when tax revenues dipped during recessions but didn't adequately restore those when times got better. Consequently, community colleges, where some of the best, cost-efficient technical training is offered, and some universities cut more-expensive programs in engineering, nursing and the like. Too many students are herded into liberal studies of some kind.



Growing up in the New York state public schools -- back before the discovery of the computer chip -- I studied Iroquois culture, early 20th-century child labor problems and Gov. Al Smith's reforms but we also wrote essays about Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers.

Now, students read Maya Angelou, get a steady portion of liberal theology about the exploitive history of white European culture and are encouraged to find themselves instead of learning something useful.






Most Popular
New submarine set for commissioning New submarine set for commissioning
Trending News
Around the Web