It is
becoming increasingly difficult to find a skilled technician to fix anything. Everything
is disposable – something breaks down, let’s buy a new one. There are fewer and
fewer technical and trade schools and, even if there were more, American students
are not interested in learning a trade. They have been conditioned by society
and by their parents that, unless they get a four-year college degree, anything
else is not worth their effort and time.
Technician
and trade jobs are generally filled by foreign workers, legal and illegal
because Americans are not qualified, nor interested in pursuing such jobs. When
our home was completed and there were some problems, every company I called to
fix something sent a foreign national. I counted twenty-seven individuals born
outside of the U.S. who did not learn their trade in this country. How is that
possible?
Germans have
trade schools attached to most large companies and only about a third of high
school graduates are interested in going to college even though college is
free. They attend a trade school or a technical college. Those jobs pay well
and are easy to find.
Why are
American students not interested in studying something that would assure them
employment when they graduate and the satisfaction of a job well done?
Why are
American college advisors promising them a six-figure salary when they are
pursuing majors in fields in which they have no chance of ever getting a job or
making a decent living?
What good is
your passion if there are no jobs to feed this passion? Why can’t their passion
be pursued as an extra-curricular activity while doing something else that
earns them a decent living?
Why have
Americans been conditioned to think that a soldier wearing a helmet who defends
his country should make way less money than an athlete with a helmet who
defends and chases a football on a grassy field?
Students are
advised to pursue majors in multiculturalism, postmodernism, feminist theory,
gender studies, indigenous psychology, complexity theory, post-colonialism,
ecological studies, Eastern thought, racial studies, and contemplative
practices and traditions.
Unless they
plan on becoming radical activists or community organizers with ANTIFA, BLM,
Pink Hats feminists, and other such violent groups, they will find zero jobs
but will have a huge baggage of debt hanging around their necks like an
albatross.
According to
Forbes, the total student loan debt of $1.2 trillion is negatively affecting
the economy and those who owe thousands of dollars in student debt upon
graduation with a diploma hardly worth the ink that it is printed on. One in
ten graduates owes more than $40,000 in student loans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/specialfeatures/2013/08/07/how-the-college-debt-is-crippling-students-parents-and-the-economy/#376a43a02e17
The national
debt clock counts student loan debt at $1.5 trillion, a much higher number than
the $1.02 trillion credit card debt. With the median income at $30,592, one
wonders how these students will ever pay back these huge school loans. http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Steve Odland
acknowledged five years ago that, “Education is the great equalizer in this
country. It is the facilitator of the American Dream. People can grow up poor,
in an urban or rural setting, but can hope to pull themselves up out of poverty
with education. Unlike many other areas of the world, America mostly is a
meritocracy facilitated by education.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveodland/2012/03/24/college-costs-are-soaring/#5163c9281f86
Unfortunately
that is not the case anymore in many areas of education where jobs no longer exist
or are scarce as automation and artificial intelligence replaced the need for
humans. Students are forced to live in their parents’ basement looking for that
six-figure salary their advisor promised, eventually having to settle for
baristas in coffee shops, retail associates, waiters, or protesters for hire.
Yet advisors
keep steering students into majors that are totally useless in today’s world.
At the same time, college costs escalate way beyond inflation rates to pay for
inflated tenured professorial salaries, university trust funds, and athletic
programs and expensive stadiums. I don’t see any liberals protesting the escalating
tuition costs; they just want more money for education and school loans.
Who makes
money from the 44 million Americans in debt because of student loans? The short
answer is the federal government, banks, private investors, and Wall Street.
Before
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Higher Education Act of 1965, prospective
students had to pay for education themselves from savings, a generous
scholarship, or from an inheritance. Poor but smart people could not pursue
higher education unless they made a personal loan.
Congress
created in 1972 the Student Loan Marketing Association or Sallie Mae. Sallie
Mae bought loans from banks after banks had loaned money to students, thus
freeing the banks to make more loans. At the time tuition was much lower and
much more manageable on an average salary.
Congress decided
in 1996 to turn Sallie Mae into a private agency thus giving it power to make
its own loans, both federally guaranteed loans, as well as private loans with
higher interest rates but no strings attached.
Sallie Mae
became so large and powerful that in 2014 it turned its federally-guaranteed student
loans into a new company, Navient, leaving Sallie Mae to handle only private
loans. According to James B. Steele and Lance Williams, “CEO Albert Lord
received pay and stock totaling hundreds of millions of dollars before he
retired in 2013.”
Ninety
percent of the $1.5 trillion student loan debt is held by the federal
government as either original lender or a guarantor of a loan. The Department
of Education has certainly become an enormous bank funded by taxpayers.
“In fiscal
year 2014, students borrowed approximately $100 billion through federal loan
programs.” The highest default rate was
experienced in consolidated loans both in 2014 (20.9%) and 2015 (21.2%). In 2013, the default rate of such consolidated
loans was 25 percent. http://www.edcentral.org/edcyclopedia/federal-student-loan-default-rates/
“The
government earns as much as 20 percent on each of its loans” because it borrows
money at a lower rate and lends to students at a higher rate. According to the Government Accountability
Office’s 2014 report, the government made $66 billion in profit from student loans
made between 2007 and 2012. https://www.gillibrand.senate.gov/news/press/release/gillibrand-statement-on-new-gao-report-released-showing-federal-government-profit-of-66-billion-on-federal-student-loans-graduates-currently-saddled-with-over-1-trillion-in-student-loan-debt
Congress
lowered student loan interest rates in 2013 but those who already had
outstanding loans did not benefit from this “bonanza” of generosity. As most
students can attest, it is easy to begin with a loan of $50,000 that balloons
with compounding interest and penalties to over $125,000 in a few years.
The loan
becomes unpayable when the student is unable to find a job or the job barely
pays enough for the student to survive on because the worthless diploma they earned
in utopian thought or women’s studies has not taught them any useful or marketable
skills in the real world.
Filing for
bankruptcy is hardly a fix since Congress has made student loans not dischargeable
in bankruptcy proceedings except in very rare cases. Even in old age, the government
can take as much as 15 percent of a debtor’s Social Security check in order to
service an unpaid student loan balance.
Delinquent
borrowers who have fallen on hard times are often surprised to learn that the
government can make “administrative offsets” from tax refunds and disability
checks.
How can the
federal government ask U.S. citizens to pay back student loans when illegal
aliens are getting their education free? Illegal aliens are “dreamers” but
legal citizens are considered “racists” when questioning such liberal insanity.
The Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau estimates that there are eight million loans in
default out of 41 million loans and “one out of four borrowers are delinquent or
in default on a student loan.” (p. 3) http://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201509_cfpb_student-loan-servicing-report.pdf
According to
Steele and Williams, the DOE hires debt collectors with taxpayer dollars to
harass and collect from those who fell behind their student loans or cannot
afford to pay them. These collectors make an estimated $2.1 billion in
commissions.
It seems
that it would be much less costly for taxpayers if these students did not
receive so many loans to begin with, especially if their majors show that there
are no jobs available in the economy,
their grades are poor, or simply scale back their indebtedness through write
offs.
Counseling
students the right way, without the profit motive in mind, would benefit students,
the economy, and the taxpayers. But colleges plan to keep their student
enrollment up, professors need their classrooms full, college financial
advisors aspire to distribute as many loans as possible, and banks want profits.
Not every
college student I have ever taught was really college material, motivated
enough to succeed, or even enjoyed being in college. Some could have benefited
from attending a trade school or a technical college.
