2204 The burden of student loans

Sandra Block authors an article in USAToday on the burden of college loans. It was so anecdotal, I almost despaired at trying to parse it for the holes, gaps and exaggerations. The charts were all over the place, covering 30 years here, 10 years there, adjusted for 2005 dollars, and squiggly lines criss-crossing, going nowhere in particular. I knew if I worked hard enough at figuring it out, it would all be Bush's fault, but I had hoped for something better.

Let's parse her first example: a pre-pharmacy student, now 19, who figures he will owe $150,000 by the time he gets his doctorate. Does anyone want to figure what he would owe if he borrowed living expenses for six years and didn't go to school and didn't work? Probably a lot more than $150,000 unless he lived at no higher than $25,000/year which would get him into the food pantry in Columbus for supplemental peanut butter and mac/cheese.

Then there is her next example, an education major, who will be $15,000 in debt with a B.S. For 5 years of education, that doesn't sound too bad--less than a car loan, and she'll only have to work 10 months of the year and will get a buy out with a $50,000 incentive when she is 50 years old if she works for Columbus City Schools.

The third is really my favorite. A social worker who graduated in 1997 with a master's and $22,000 in debt. Conservatively, that's for 5 or 6 years of education. Her debt is now $29,000 even after a consolidation. Hello! That's not your school loan! That's $7,000 interest on a loan (probably with late charges) because you didn't pay it back.

The fourth example of student debt is a woman minister who consolidated her $33,000 debt reducing it to $200/mo, but now has no money to buy a house or save for retirement. So she has a bachelor's and master's degree, and was willing to chose a field that is becoming heavily female and didn't even pay well even when dominated by men? Girlfriend (as Suze would say), did you walk into this with the clerical collar around your eyes and ears? Large successful churches don't hire female ministers; didn't anyone in divinity school mention that?

So who are the experts Block consults for this masterpiece of research? Amy at the National Center and American Daughter may need to help me out here, but I'm taking a wild guess that the non-profit experts she consulted for this article are left of center.

• Project on Student Debt (endorsed by Rock the Vote)
  
• Center for Economic and Policy Research (advocates for gov't programs for every level of endeavor, but it's never enough, and requires more funding for each failure)
  
• Public Interest Research Group (although I be suspicious of any acronym called PIRG, seems to be heavy into tree hugging issues)

The headline for the article is: "Students suffocate under tens of thousands in loans." So I went into one of those "Money was worth" such-and-so many years ago sites, and discovered that the $10,600 debt for a public college today (the average according to Block) would have been about $2,500 in 1975, or $1,725 in 1961 when I graduated.

So, ask your mother or grandmother if she felt "suffocated" by debt when she finished college. Yes, 1961 attitudes toward money were different. We didn't have cell phones, broad band, or cable TV to pay for. Eating out was for special occasions a few times a year. (Cut those 4 things out of your budget and see if you don't have enough to pay off a loan.) And most importantly, people got married before they decided to "save money" by living together. Marriage broadened their base of family support from two families instead of one.

I'm sure there's more to it, but debt is debt. You borrow it; you pay it back.

student loans
college expenses