I am a parent of a son who signed up for the equivalent of a $200,000 30-year mortgage when he was 25 years old and had only a future education as collateral. No bank would give anyone else such a deal. He had been accepted to law school where nearly 50% of the students drop out or are asked to leave before graduation. How do they repay such a loan? Even if they can return the part that is not yet spent, it is unreasonable. The banks must KNOW that there will be failures to pay, just as they knew the low-income people applying for mortgages could not make the payments, so they bet against them and won! It is a scam.
Our son did get his law degree and went on for a master’s degree and is now teaching law at a university overseas, but his income is nothing compared to what he could earn as a lawyer or a law professor in the US, so he and his family live in a three room apartment, will never own a car, and can visit family back in the US only if we are able to pay the airfare for them. Living a meager life style, and working as a first rate teacher, he struggles to make his payments (though he has never missed one). When he studied in the Netherlands for his advanced degree in International Law, he had to rely on student loans while all of his classmates’ fees and living expenses were paid by their home country’s government. They came from Africa, Europe, South America, Asia. It is only the US that requires its brightest students to be stunted unless they are willing to take on a huge burden of debt (or they come from very wealthy families—the aristocracy).
We always taught our children that if they worked hard, they could achieve their goals, but he finished his education just when the economic crash hit the US, and Universities here froze hiring and froze salaries. Positions in his field in this country are unlikely to open up for several more years, and then the competition for every job will be ferocious.
We are working past retirement age so we can accumulate enough extra in our 401 (k) to pay off the balance of his loans, even if it means we must risk our own support if we should live longer than our funds, also damaged by the (Bush) recession.
What are we to do? We have produced a well-educated, first rate scholar who is a great example of US determination, but the price is like a punishment for daring to dream and working to achieve your dream, but a dream that carries NO FINANCIAL REWARDS, quite the opposite. The US has cast aside much of our human talent because the financial barriers to higher education or the debt of loans with no appropriate jobs to pay them back, has killed the “can-do” spirit of our nation and made it impossible for many young people to ever recover economic security and good credit.
It just seems to me that this whole student loan program was just another device for moving money from the hardest-working middle class people to the wealthy banks. The only fair solution is to force the wealthy banks to forgive a significant portion of the loans they enticed young people to shoulder.
Our son did get his law degree and went on for a master’s degree and is now teaching law at a university overseas, but his income is nothing compared to what he could earn as a lawyer or a law professor in the US, so he and his family live in a three room apartment, will never own a car, and can visit family back in the US only if we are able to pay the airfare for them. Living a meager life style, and working as a first rate teacher, he struggles to make his payments (though he has never missed one). When he studied in the Netherlands for his advanced degree in International Law, he had to rely on student loans while all of his classmates’ fees and living expenses were paid by their home country’s government. They came from Africa, Europe, South America, Asia. It is only the US that requires its brightest students to be stunted unless they are willing to take on a huge burden of debt (or they come from very wealthy families—the aristocracy).
We always taught our children that if they worked hard, they could achieve their goals, but he finished his education just when the economic crash hit the US, and Universities here froze hiring and froze salaries. Positions in his field in this country are unlikely to open up for several more years, and then the competition for every job will be ferocious.
We are working past retirement age so we can accumulate enough extra in our 401 (k) to pay off the balance of his loans, even if it means we must risk our own support if we should live longer than our funds, also damaged by the (Bush) recession.
What are we to do? We have produced a well-educated, first rate scholar who is a great example of US determination, but the price is like a punishment for daring to dream and working to achieve your dream, but a dream that carries NO FINANCIAL REWARDS, quite the opposite. The US has cast aside much of our human talent because the financial barriers to higher education or the debt of loans with no appropriate jobs to pay them back, has killed the “can-do” spirit of our nation and made it impossible for many young people to ever recover economic security and good credit.
It just seems to me that this whole student loan program was just another device for moving money from the hardest-working middle class people to the wealthy banks. The only fair solution is to force the wealthy banks to forgive a significant portion of the loans they enticed young people to shoulder.
Beverley Worster submitted this to 