Higher Education Debt: Why I Decided to Incur it

The Problem

The usual notion regarding higher education debt is that is an investment in one’s future and that any debt incurred achieving higher education is good debt. This proposition is most evident by the governmental guarantees that ensure the obscene tuition costs will be funded. The premise behind good debt is that it is an investment and although you may owe money, at the end of the day it is really putting money back in your pocket, usually through higher returns.

While attending undergraduate university the typical student incurs a debt of nearly 30,000 dollars. See Average Student Loan Debt Approaches $30,000. If a student decides to continue their education into graduate school, one sees a sharp spike in tuition. With one quarter facing “good” debt over 100,000 dollars and one out of ten incurring over 150,000 dollars; all in addition to their undergraduate loans, which are still incurring interest. See How Much Loan Debt is From Grad Students? More Than You Think.

The incursion of higher education debt is often seen as commonplace and one seldom envisions the negative effects this debt may have. Since graduates are crippled with student loans; even if they are able to secure a job, a large percentage of their income goes directly to the monthly loan payments. The loan payments on top of rent and other living expenses and necessities prevent recent graduates the ability to form any type of savings. The lack of savings kills the economy. Instead of being able to use the potential increase in salary from the “good” debt of student loans to further invest in the economy, either through mortgages and home improvements or savvy stock market investments, the majority is forced to use any gain in paying off the student debt. With the large debt looming over recent graduates, many are desperate to find any job that will provide them with the ability to make the monthly payments. Upon successfully finding a job many soon realize that their debt ball and chains them to the job, through the ever looming monthly payments.

Granted, the incursion of debt to fund higher education is avoidable. Especially undergraduate debt, however, graduate debt with the drastically increased tuition and curricular demand is much harder, but not impossible, to avoid.

Higher Education Debt: Why I Decided to Incur it?

Is Higher Education Debt Good or Bad Debt?

Why I Still Chose to Incur Higher Education Debt

Undergraduate

Pre-Law School

Law School

Personal Results

I'm not sure how the rewrite is supposed to be responsive to my comments. "Millennials" are people, and between them and the generations that preceded them the distinction is not the desirability of higher education. In a world where a billionaire advertises the importance of funding startups by college dropouts, your talk of the impossibility of getting any job at all without a college degree sounds, as I said last time, like the transplantation of the problems suffered by people without your cognitive endowments and social advantages onto your own situation. I got my first job at the onset of the 1973-74 recession, without a high school diploma, when I was 14. I had a skill. I was a good learner. So are you, and everyone around you. But acquiring a skill that would allow you to work advantageously to pay for your education was not a priority for you, or you would have done it. Borrowing money against future earnings in order to get an education isn't a requirement for people of your talents and privileges. It's a choice. Whether it is a good choice or a bad choice can be discussed, analyzed, written about. But it has to be faced as what it is. I asked you to revise this essay to consider the matter as choice. You have returned another draft that once again slips this rather significant aspect of the situation.

We are not talking about the mass of people: we are talking about you. How you, with your powers and your resources, can strategize your life. If we are to fall back immediately into assertions about the average in the society, and how in a world of inequality those on the wrong side of the divide are trapped, then we are ignoring both your advantages and your responsibilities. That, for at least one course in the early part of law school, I am trying not to do. Please help me.

Is the Incursion of Debt Avoidable?

How is the Debt Avoidable

The Downsides of Working to Avoid Debt

The Ramifications of Incurring Higher Education Debt

Economic Strain

The lack of savings kills the economy. Instead of being able to use the potential increase in salary from the “good” debt of student loans to further invest in the economy, either through mortgages and home improvements or savvy stock market investments, the majority is forced to use any gain in paying off the student debt.

No Mortgages

Since graduates are crippled with student loans; even if they are able to secure a job, a large percentage of their income goes directly to the monthly loan payments. The loan payments on top of rent and other living expenses and necessities prevent recent graduates the ability to form any type of savings. With out a savings the Millennials have no opportunities to secure a mortgage, an actual good debt, and are forced to continue to throw away their income on rent and loan payments.

The Problem

That education is important to living a good life and making something more of oneself than one started with has been mentioned to other, preceding demographic cohorts over the last several thousand years. That one would go into monetary debt for that education requires willingness to loan to young people who have no work experience or present ascertainable independent sources of income. It is evident that under ordinary circumstances there would be insufficient sources of such credit to make the experience of student debt more than exceptional. Government guarantees are what generate the mortgage market. So why are we beginning with what they told you, not what they told the people who put up the money?

Undergraduate Debt

Why not make links? This is web writing.

Graduate Debt

So Millennials are forced

"Forced" to be "truly successful in life"? Do I have that right?

Is there a reason why one reporter in one magazine is the world's best source for US student loan data?

The Ramifications

Pigeonholed

Kills Creativity

No Mortgages

Can Only Rent: Economic Strain

The tuition levels, corrected for inflation, of a liberal arts college like Swarthmore, law school and graduate school at a place like Yale, now somewhat exceed the costs that I paid for those places between 1976 and 1985, when I got BA, PhD and JD degrees there (or rather, when I paid the tuition for those degrees: the PhD I didn't get until 1993, after I finished a dissertation interrupted by two clerkships, etc.). Like you, I would have considered the debt incurred by that process to be a serious interference with life. So I didn't borrow any money. I earned the cost of those degrees, programming computers, mostly at Xerox and IBM. My grandmother gave me some help, for which I was very grateful. I didn't ask my parents for a nickel. (I had two younger brothers who also needed college educations—ultimately, as it turned out, at Yale—so I thought they had plenty to do without me on their tab.)

It would be somewhat harder now, as I say, because prices have gone up a little more than inflation (though not than salaries in the trade I was pursuing to pay for it all). If I had it to do over again now, with approximately equal resources in nominal dollars, I would have to incur some debt to get through. And not everyone has a parent or grandparent who can help out at all in that time of one's life. So it is undoubtedly harder to avoid all debt now than it was a generation ago. But the willingness to borrow it all, minus some summer earnings—thus pillaging your practice of future equity in two directions, working for people who are not showing you any better way out of debt than pressing your nose long-term against their grindstone—is a product of your mindset, not a lifting of the economic reality that puts debt and equity on opposite sides of the ledger.

Our segment of society in this school—where talented and mostly advantaged people attend the most influential and perhaps even sophisticated places of higher education—is not where the debt crisis has hurt by "force." You could—as all the other talented people here could— pay for your own educations by earning rather than borrowing, if you were trained to do so and willing to incur the work. The people who are being suckered into debt they cannot repay are far less fortunate in life than you are, without exceptional cognitive endowments and life choices, who are borrowing much larger sums of money relative to their current or future earning power, and whose prospects in life the education they are indebting themselves for will not significantly advance. You are voicing their grievance from a position that most of them would not recognize at all as like their own. To me, on the other hand, you do seem very much like the person I was, except that you aren't willing to back the conclusions you are drawing with the recognition that it's not "the system" determining the results, but you.

When I was a young adult, taking a second mortgage on one's home was a sign of acute financial distress, an obviously unsafe activity to be resorted to in emergency. Later, when it was called a "home equity line of credit," people came to consider it normal. A few thousand households around the US became very much richer, and tens of millions of people lost their homes. Nobody forced them to borrow money. Nobody forces you. The process is more complex, and the nature of power's effort more subtle. The story told is plainly in substantial part a rationalization, a self-deception. It's an effort to renarrate as a conscious choice (even if under some mysterious form of compulsion) a series of very important, perhaps life-defining behaviors that actually came about some other way. The route to the improvement of the draft is to look for what you look at all the time, but which you also always look right through.

Section II: The Ramifications

Subsection A: Pigeonholed

Subsection B: No Mortgages

Since graduates are crippled with student loans; even if they are able to secure a job, a large percentage of their income goes directly to the monthly loan payments. The loan payments on top of rent and other living expenses and necessities prevent recent graduates the ability to form any type of savings. With out a savings the Millennials have no opportunities to secure a mortgage, an actual good debt, and are forced to continue to throw away their income on rent and loan payments.

Subsub 1: Can Only Rent: Economic Strain

Higher Education Debt: Is It Truly Good Debt?

Section I: The Problem

Subsection A: Undergraduate Debt

Subsection B: Graduate Debt

Section II: The Ramifications

Subsection A: Pigeon Holed

Subsub 1: Kills Creativity

Subsection B: Economic Strain

Subsub 1: Can Only Rent: No Mortages

Paper Title

-- By CharlesRoper - 17 Feb 2016

Section I

Subsection A

Subsub 1

Subsection B

Subsub 1

Subsub 2

Section II

Subsection A

Subsection B

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