Clue: Republicans are a big factor.

sure it might take longer to complete school but education is not a race, if one completes in 2 weeks or 8 years the result is still the same.

I choose the no debt route myself and it is hard work and you pretty much don't have a life except for work and school but also worth it in the end.

If it were up to me all education would be free to those who want it, Some states did have free higher education at one point, California was the most notable state to do so, well at least from what I remember from the news back then, and Ronald Reagan took it away, got to make a profit off education, can't educate people for free, nope, isn't happening.

including going to ebooks. No I am not going to post ways to make it work it is pointless mental masturbation.

A number of countries have free or low cost higher education today and they have it for years.

or we could stay with what we got and evolve into Idiocracy.

I don't think it was worth it.

Now with prices the risen the way they have, that will not cover the costs either.

improved quality of life?

I would not wish that on anyone.

wired differently however I do understand to a degree too because there a few people like me around, we all sort of gravitate towards each other and if working with people who do not work well under stress I make sure they are not put into stressful situations so they can give their best to the group.

Would the stress of large debt have been better for you?

think.

is stress to some degree.

If you can find a way to live and support yourself in a 100% stress free environment I am happy for you.

If stress is debilitating I hope you have sought out some medical advice to help you with it.

those were the best years of my life.

My wife and I were both working full time. She was in grad school and I was undergrad. Both at Hunter College.

We lived in one room, four flights up, with a convertible sofa.

We brought our kids to our first home a few years ago and they both described it as a "Rat hole."

It was.

When my parents came for their first visit my mother staggered up the stairs and my father, who grew up in Harlem, said:

"Your grandfather moved us out of a nicer apartment than this in 1924."

It took my wife two years to earn her Masters, then 12 more (on and off) for her Doctorate. We were lucky that we were able to "paycheck" her studies. Took me six years for my degree and at that point I was done with classrooms.

As I said, they were the best years our life, but I can't imagine my kids doing the same.

I did get to live at home most through college and saved on rent. But I paid for a lot of my own schooling. Easy? No way. Social life? Some. Reward = excellent.

work 40+ per week, wife, rent, minimum class load 21 hrs per semester.

From my experience many of the younger classmates were more into party, which is fine, I did the party thing before going to school myself I was in my mid to late 20's, but if I had went direct to school and taken out loans to pay for it I would I felt like I paid all that money for a 4 year party.

Good times. I allowed myself Friday night after class to party. I had a blast! I have fond memories of that time of my life. About 8 years later I did the same thing for my Masters. It wasn't as fun but by then your fun party days should be complete. No debt at the end of both degrees.

I worked at a radio station in the evenings. We drank beer and got high at work. LOL. That was my party time.

The cost of secondary education has skyrocketed, and what most people without a degree can earn has fallen.

more than 20 years ago.

rent was $386 for a 2 bedroom, gas was a buck.

Still had to take loans.

I worked, won scholarships and grants and it was no where near enough to cover tuition and housing costs. I had to supplement costs with loans. This was in the early nineties. The cost of higher education has skyrocketed since then. There is no way to afford to work and pay for university anymore. That ability died in the mid eighties.

and more jobs, period.

It's much harder for students today, and they're being steered toward loans, to boot.

Not accounting for taxes, the $500,000 account resulting from $2500/monthly invested at 10% for 10 years provides an income of $50,000 annually.

If your work provides you enough extra income to finance $30,000 a year for college, keep doing that.

I worked through college and still needed loans. I would have had a lot higher GPA too if I didn't work so many hours while I was in college.

Republicans want to make college harder and dumber because educated people tend to vote Democratic.

[font size=4]It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

-Jiddu Krishnamurti[/font size]

This predatory system has been orchestrated to require debt and indentured servitude as a prerequisite for participating in "normal" society for masses of Americans. Add to that a punitive, mean, and increasingly authoritarian culture where basic human values of community and empathy have been perverted and diminished in order to celebrate values of the corporate state.

We have experienced a malignant, orchestrated descent from the days in which is was possible to support an entire family on one income and still take vacations and afford health care.

This is corporatism creating feudalism.

Of course people are depressed.

about their motives for going to college and what they hope to accomplish. There's is nothing sorrier than a waitress or bartender with more college debt than what they'll earn in 10 years. If you don't know what you want to do with yourself, don't go to college because it's the only thing you can think of doing with your life at the moment. I'm not suggesting anyone stop learning, just encouraging them not to pay for it without giving a great deal of thought to it. (There are plenty of free courses and seminars online and elsewhere to engage the mind for free.) Obviously, if you have a specific goal in mind that requires a degree the circumstance is different. I'm only suggesting people don't mindlessly put themselves in the hole for the rest of their lives. In a perfect world, state universities would be free, but half of our population is too dim witted to realize what a good idea that might be and elect people who disdain education.

Right now the best way we can fight back it to deny them our money because that is what they really want and expose them and their families which they don’t want.

Personally I think a nice subtle message to the oligarchs would be if Americans all over the country started building replica, 100% functional is optional, guillotines and leaving them in their front yards or windows, if you live in the city, as a sign of protest.

Perhaps then they will get the message.

In a more enlightened and ideal country, education at public colleges would be free, but that's not the reality we live in in the US right now. We'd rather spend money on fleets of ridiculously expensive fighter jets than on educating our citizens. Unfortunately, even given that reality, people seem determined that college MUST be attended and that they will get the most expensive education they can squeeze out at the most prestigious college they can get into to, with little or no thought for the long-term financial consequences. Part of that is due to strong social pressure and an intense marketing campaign by the higher education industry to convince people that if you DON'T go to college, you're less than a fully developed human being, but part of it is also due to a pervasive feeling of entitlement among many people that leads them to think that if they want something, they should have it, whether they can actually afford it or not. Of course, the fact that a lot of people have no clue about how to do long-term financial planning doesn't help either.

The fact that it's so easy to attend college while deferring so much of the cost not only enables this sense of entitlement to spend money you don't have, but also helps drive costs up and up, putting more and more people in this kind of hole. It's not a coincidence that the two financial sectors where costs have regularly gone up far faster than inflation (health care and higher education) also involve expenses that many people do not pay directly out of their pockets, but have funded either through insurance or loans/scholarships, so that the full cost is either not borne by the consumer at all, or is deferred for a long time. I guarantee you that if the only college people could attend was what they funded out of their own pockets on a semester-by-semester basis (or, alternatively, if student loans had the same 4-6 year term as car loans), college costs everywhere would plummet. But with so many people relying on long-term loans to fund college, colleges have no compelling reason to rein in costs. They get their money up front, and don't give a fuck what kind of financial hole their graduates end up in after they leave.

People go back to school, yes. But it gets difficult as you get older...

Just finding a job in a field you have no experience in is hard enough...finding one to start with a decent salary is near impossible. If you are in your 30s and 40s, you likely have bills you didn't have in your early 20s so you may not be able to afford entry level salaries. You may need insurance and prescriptions which may lock you into your job you have now because the cost of insurance is a lot less than if you went through ACA.

Why does education cost so much?

Why do we as a society worship the debt fetish?

Just to add…the American public has been hard sold on two things as being vital to achieving "the American Dream": A college education and home ownership. Many, many people have been convinced that if they haven't attained those goals, they are in some way a failure, so they stretch themselves to (or beyond) the financial breaking point to achieve them, even when they can't afford or don't really need either.

. . . in both posts echo mine.

Still, I'm not if there isn't more to it.

Making payments on my car loan or home loan depresses me.
Answer is, don't borrow what you cannot pay back.
The lenders have this unfair notion that the borrower needs to pay them back.

Perkins Loans (regardless of the first disbursement date) have a fixed interest rate of 5%.

https://studentaid.ed.gov/types/loans/interest-rates#what-are-the-interest-rates-of-federal-student-loans

I actually just went to check what my highest interest rate is, and it's 7.65%! And that's not a private student loan, that's one through the Department of Education. Christ, my freaking Discover credit card that has a ~9% interest rate.

It's ridiculous that student loans carry such relatively high interest rates given that you mostly can't discharge them through bankruptcy. Either allow them to be discharged, or retroactively lower the rates to just a bit above your typical inflation. Maybe around 3%.

that our son took out without our knowing, one that he really didn't need at the time (except for money to party on rather than getting a part time job,) as we learn later that is. Never even finished the first semester. We paid off the note though

How were you on the hook for his loans if you did not co-sign for them?

When the bill started coming here we just took it upon ourselves to pay it. After all his address and ours was the same and when we asked what this was about he told us.

This is also a major source of stress for adult learners who are trying to better their lives - maybe even more-so, since many have families to support.

Depression is one symptom but watch out for anger

when a person gets back into a corner ...watch out


It's not just school loans they deal with
higher medical costs
lower wages
inflation

and on top of it they have to save money for retirement

Yes it's pretty depressing what's going on in America and what we are doing to our children

Over 50% of Children in America schools are in Poverty and they are not going to be able to pay for college
A progressive and technological superior nation NEEDS educated people or it will crumble and be destroyed by a Technologically Superior Nation who did educate their kids.

all this stress makes them sick/disabled and they attempt to try to apply for benefits. Then they get to hear what lazy, irresponsible, malingers they are as they try to hold on for the years it takes to actually get anything. Then their "benefits" will consist of a couple hundred dollars a month in *loans* while they endure the further stress of trying to avoid homelessness under those conditions and the eternal scrutiny and judgment that people in poverty have to endure.

That's the society these kids themselves voted in under the threat that their generation "would have to pay" for any "entitlements"...

Years ago I cranked the numbers and pointed out that we couldn't possibly collect more than two-thirds of the outstandings then. Since then, the projected losses have only grown.

I think we need to rethink everything. This is not the way to handle things.

And I don't owe as much as some other folks I know.


If you have a skill, skip college.
If you don't have a skill, learn one.

My friends that are HVAC, Plumbing, electric and the like are making more money than I am.

I'm very familiar with the trades and tradesmen, of the many older ones I know a lot have physical ailments brought on by decades of doing things like carrying heavy items up many flights of stairs, falls from ladders, scaffolds and so on, working tight spaces in contorted positions, working in extremes of heat and cold.

At the moment I have a friend who is hoping he is physically able to continue to work another 18 months until he turns 62 and can draw (reduced) SS. Ten years ago he was making $100K, now he's lucky to make $25K and scrambling hard for jobs to make that.

ETA: In fact the next thread I clicked on after leaving this thread was here....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026195458

"Few white-collar people understand the degree to which manual labor chews up workers’ bodies"

And with shit contract and temp jobs out there, good luck with most of them ever being paid back. And convienently they cant be written off in bankruptcy

and I will not go into the harassment and injustice with the whole thing. But my father died and the little money I received I paid the damn thing off in December of 2014. I still get crapo letters from them not asking for money but just shit lame reminders of one sort or another. I am at the point of demanding that they halt all contact with me. Assholes.

ones future vice a mortgage on real property.

We all have choices in life, if I need money and I don't have any I have the following choices:

A. Obtain job and work for the money
B. Borrow the money from a financial institution
C. Commit a felony for the money
D. Borrow the money from a loan shark.
E. Have someone just give me the money
F. Sell asset to pay for what I want

These are the only choices for the vast majority of people in America and the world.

If folks choose B without thinking of all the consequences, then what should everyone do because one chooses unwisely and later regrets their choice?

Yes education loans can be expensive however even if every ones loan interest were set to zero many people would still be stressed out and depressed because of the amount of money they borrowed.

Student Loan Debt forgiveness is not gonna happen either if we start forgiving student loans then we need to start forgiving mortgage loans too.

I would love to see free education in America but it will NEVER happen as long as folks are voting for and supporting corporate candidates.