Middleman
Defender of the month
A lot of parents and their college aged kids are being duped into taking on exorbitant amounts of debt to obtain degrees that don't always pay off. The girl in the article owes $100,000 and is now making $22 an hour, finally. She's got a fancy degree and a boatload of debt. The universities are giving students poor counsel and hooking them up with lending agencies. The whole thing sounds like a scam on their part, taking advantage of gullible kids.
Why don't high schools have courses in budget management as a mandatory class before graduation? These kids are like sheep at slaughter being sent into a predatory world. Not to downplay individual responsibility, but the colleges and lenders bear a large part of the blame here.
Placing the Blame as Students Are Buried in Debt--NY Times
Why don't high schools have courses in budget management as a mandatory class before graduation? These kids are like sheep at slaughter being sent into a predatory world. Not to downplay individual responsibility, but the colleges and lenders bear a large part of the blame here.
Placing the Blame as Students Are Buried in Debt--NY Times
Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began the college selection process with a grim determination. They would do whatever they could to get Cortney into the best possible college, and they maintained a blind faith that the investment would be worth it.
Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she's been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments.
This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues to pile up. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up.
Meanwhile, universities like N.Y.U. enrolled students without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual tuition bill. Then the colleges introduced the students to lenders who underwrote big loans without any idea of what the students might earn someday — just like the mortgage lenders who didn't ask borrowers to verify their incomes.
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