Ayup. I disagree about the need to “restore consumer protections for student loans,” ’cause nothing will help burst the higher-ed bubble permanently than a generation of kids seeing their parents struggling to pay $100k for their $40k defaulted debt, heh, heh. But the rest is about right.
Examine the first premise, first.
What is the magic of a Mark One, Mod Zero, college liberal arts degree anyway? Is it REALLY worth it to your kid to get this “start in life”?
The Ivory Tower establishment throws out numbers that are supposed to convince us that we are cruel and inhuman if we don’t send our kids to college to get a four-year degree (which takes 5 years or more, usually).
Then, the “prestige” colleges and universities try to tell us that jacking up the price of that education 4 or 5 times over a State University is “really” worth it.
The fact of the matter is that if you boil it down to whether a youth has been raised to have a strong work ethic and a strong sense of self-worth, the ones who have it succeed and the ones who don’t, don’t.
A good kid, taking advantage of military skills or learning business skills at a Community College (where the same courses are a third of the their cost at University), then getting an entry level job and working his/her way up through a company (or the government, for that matter), can do better for him/her self than a kid whose parents have indebted themselves to two-years salary-worth to put their kid through a degree program at a “better” school. The Ivory Tower education only helps those who want to work in an Ivory Tower.
Besides, if you send your kid to either Harvard or Ohio State, he’s likely to still come out a Democrat anyway. All that money to raise another liberal voter? No thanks. Did that, wouldn’t make that mistake again.
I agree, consumer protections aren’t what is needed (although that bit about SLM getting 2 bites at the apple is kinda slimy), no one takes out a student loan without knowing full well what the defaulting terms are (i.e. you get to default when you die)..
What we do need is to stop telling everyone they have to have a BA/BS degree just to make a living. I mean, sure, a degree is a door opener when done right, but a degree is not a guarantee of a job, and except for professionals (doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, professors, etc.) it should not even be a requirement. The problem is, our public schools are so crappy (with only a few bright spots) that employers want the degree mainly to help find quality workers. The idea is that if they got a four year degree, the should know how to read & write gooder than the rest, they can stick to a task, they are probably computer literate, & they are likely in debt & need money bad.
What they (hopefully) are not is some schmuck who thinks proper prose is the shorthand that passes for conversation on the cell phone (or actual speech & thought on The Jersey Shore).
We also need to force all schools to be honest with their attrition rates, graduation rates, and job placement rates. A lot of schools report that over 90% of their graduates find jobs, but those numbers reflect graduates who are employed, not graduates who are employed in a career related to their degree; you can graduate from college with a degree in physics and if the only job you can land is flipping burgers, you are a graduate with a job.
There are a lot of degree mills taking in federal student aid money and delivering a crap education to kids too clueless to know better (another failure of the PS system, whose guidance counselors fail to teach kids or parents how to select a good school – happened to me when I graduated HS, I just figured out that I was at a crap school during my 1st semester & got out before I sunk in too much money).