A New Year and a New Commitment

In reading and learning more on this topic of student debt and loans I am moved to comment on the ingenious nature of the relationship between education and student loan programs.

When I first became a college student back in the fall of 1987 student loans were a way to get a college degree if your family didn't have the money to support you in that endeavor. In my family, as in many others, neither of my parents had ever gone to college but both had always wanted to and so for their son it was a must. For them a college degree was some sort of Holy Grail to a more prosperous life.

So the mindset was, and still is today, that student loans provided the opportunity to get that almighty college degree. Somewhere along the way however, things have changed. I am not sure quite when it happened but at some point the generalized, non-specific college degree became worth little more than toilet paper. Alright, maybe it was worth about the same as a respectable high school diploma but certainly no more.

As such the liberal arts degree in whatever color became essentially useless as a means to get a job, let alone a better life than your parents had. Nobody wanted them. I know this because I had one by the spring of 1992 and nobody would hire the green college kid with the B.A. in Economics, not even as a bank teller.

Since that time things have not improved much. Sure there was the technology boon of the 1990’s that made some millionaires, even some billionaires, but that ride crashed in the early part of 2000 along with the NASDAQ.

Today, we have high unemployment in both blue and white collar sectors with little hope on the horizon of getting people back to work. Looking retrospectively at the last 20 years since I was first a college student, it has dawned on me that educational institutions charge even more for the same degrees today. The same degrees that will get you nowhere. These colleges still provide no real support to get people respectable jobs and absolutely no guarantee that the expensive piece of paper on the wall will even do them any good.

And yet, here we are still churning out students with no place to go for good jobs with useless degrees in an environment that encourages taking on more debt with ever increasing availability of student loans, both public and private. The almighty dogma of the great college degree still persists too. Only now – even those with specific, professional degrees are finding themselves up to their necks in debt as they wait in line apply for their unemployment benefits.

We have created a system of higher education that in many cases, is failing our country and our citizens. As a culture we need to take stock of our priorities and get our financial systems in line with them, not the other way around.

For the past 20 years, at the very least, we have had a system of exploding student debt and useless higher education matched to do only one thing – to make money for some financial profiteers at the expense of the bright eyed, eager college student who thought he or she was on a path to making a good and decent life for themselves.

Sure, I can write this blog – so my two B.A. degrees and my M.A. degree (and nearly a PhD.) have served some purpose – but was it worth the immense debt I have amassed? Certainly not – because insulating pipes, which is what I do now, doesn’t require or make great use of the excessive education I have. And while it's most certainly a respectable living requiring considerable skill, the health risks it poses are certainly not the dream my parents hoped for I think. I am however resolved to making a career of it now and it does keep my head above water so for that and all the wonderful, hardworking people I have met and worked with I am so very thankful. I do wonder though, how many others like me are out there doing something similar.

The truth is, I believed in a bill of goods, namely that a college education could change my life for the better. I believed that student loans were a means to an end and that I would be able to pay them back when I was done. What I now realize was that despite how smart I thought I was there was a bigger picture. For some politicians and lobbyists out there, there were profits to be made and that take on things was just outside my field of vision. As I see it now, it must have been designed to be that way, no system this cruel could exist without intention.

I was not given the protections I deserved when I made my investment. I was not informed of the uselessness of the degrees that I found myself getting and the mountain of debt that I was accumulating that would be forever outside my reach to repay. There should be a system of informed people in place to protect our college students from this kind of predatory behavior – the kind that is so devious that even some of the brightest among us have been perpetually enslaved to their student loans with no hope of getting out from under them.

These people can’t afford to marry. They can’t afford to buy a home. They can’t afford health insurance. They can’t afford to have children. They can't afford to make any moves that will jeopardize repaying these loans that might even improve their circumstances. They can't afford to risk anything. They have none of the protections that every other type of borrower has – the right to redress when their debts have ruined their lives – stolen their lives – right before their eyes.

And in a classic, cultural cliché - we blame the student debtor because they (and I include myself here) should have known better. Maybe we should have known better but I am not so sure anymore that we could have. The system is just not designed to tell you all these things. And besides, blaming the victim doesn’t change the reality of what is happening here and it will not change what will happen to the next crop of graduating college students, or all those that will certainly follow under the current system.

This game of loaning students money for degrees that will only take them down dead end roads where there dreams will die must end. There must also be an end to the enslavement of those already trapped by their student loans.

To every American, past, present and future – this system is so perverse that it is evil in the worst Machiavellian sense and I pray you have heard this cry for justice.

Bring back the same financial protections to student loan debtors that all other forms of loans have the right to. Consider forgiving these loans to stimulate the economy. Fight for new changes to the way we finance higher education and implement tough controls on colleges who sell degrees that are lemons.

Our future depends on this, now more than ever.