According to the Department of Education for FY 2009, the cohort default rate for all student loans was 8.8 percent, and for for-profit schools (like the ones I went to) it is 15 percent. Wait, did I read that right? 8.8 percent overall, but 15 percent just for for-profit schools? In the data, that's a larger percentage than the other school categories. With a higher rate of default in the last few years, you would think that there would be more ways designed to get people out of default. Boy, that would be great.
hat tip: http://www.repeatersignal.com/index.php/lit/opinion/13-education-an-education
You would think, in the modern world, where information is power, that six years of part time college (or four years of full time for that matter) would nearly guarantee a poor boy the future of gold. Maybe not platinum, but a shiny golden horizon. But you would be surprised how muddled the decision to spend the time, money and soul is in the pursuit of the education that will make you rich, or at least comfortable.
Your parents heard how important their education was. And society followed suit. You were a college-educated kid, corporations wanted you to make a future for them. Then again, there was some status with college education. The blue collar families went and worked at local industries, or they saved enough to break the cycle for their children. White collar families continued the tradition of higher learning. It was a staple in the successful futures of America.
Of course, college these days is different. The boom of for-profit colleges paralleled the degradation of major universities by socially-inept young adults more interested in the sex and drugs of today than plans for the future. It's like America is content with being mediocre.
As well, while people complain about the high cost of education, some industries and job markets are overrun, saturated, even bursting with degree-wielding, entry-level brains. And that becomes more and more prevalent as reports about the latest hot future industry push new students toward promising career paths.
Could it be, though, that the modern, information-driven world really wants something in contrast to education? More than anything else in a resume, an employer is looking for a story. They want to pick up on someone's story closer to the middle of the book: too early in the story, they won't know how it ends; to late in the story, and the good part has passed by.
Your college days are an integral part of the story. But financial success requires the whole story. Expect to end this story of fame and fortune a few years after your graduation? Perhaps for you, a horseback ride off into the sunset as you kiss your college roommate goodbye is your happily ever after.
Wrong. Snap out of it. Guess where your story takes you. And you'll be wrong again.
The worst part about being wrong is the effect this wrongness has on your plans for the future. Wait, I did have plans, didn't I? I forgot about those. The partying and curvaceous distractions made my mind lapse. What were those again... Oh, I remember. Financial freedom, a family, laughter in the backyard barbecue over the way Tom's wife walked out of the door with the wrong color scarf to go with her broach, in a time where only grandmothers wear broaches anymore. Yes, I had plans.
But no one gave you a plan for your finances. They told you to watch out for them. They gave you choices that made it sound completely doable. And now you realize, when a recession is in full swing and you chose the wrong education for the necessities of society, that your money is gone. Your future is still a dark cloud obscuring that golden horizon. You start to wonder if that gold was really copper or pyrite, a fool's gold of the good life.
It was like that with me. I'd been told that I needed to budget repaying my loans six months after college. But every financial aid specialist, recruiter, student adviser, career counselor... they said to think in terms of what I "plan to be making". Like I can choose my salary on a shiny, plastic-coated menu. I'll take the $50,000 a year salary, hold the debt, extra benefits.
They messed up my order. What I got was perpetual entry-level, heavy on the debt and a side of self-esteem burnt to a crisp.
Now the lenders are knocking on my phone, breathing down my neck. I sit on a second-hand couch I fished out of the back lot dumping area of a furniture shop, looking up laws on garnishment and deciding to just let them fight over the scraps of the 25% of my disposable income the CCPA limits for wage deductions. I plan on the rocks under which I will hide savings so they don't get greedy and raid my bank account. I read how I won't be able to own a home, get a decent job that checks credit, get an account at a credit union, apply for federal benefits, go back to school for whatever reason, get a business loan or expect any future tax returns until my foolish, defaulting sins are repaid to the alter of the gods of education.
And I wonder how it is that, in an era where the poor scream for equal access to education and countless outcries of the future requirements of a Master's degree like the past required high school diplomas, I will ever want my children to go through this. I make plans to be much more involved than my parents were in laying out a contingency or some sort of cost-cutting option to prevent the torture of repaying student loans.
Lord knows, now that I've become educated, Sallie Mae will ensure I can't help out financially for the next generation. Not until I've repented and fulfilled my obligation.
In the mean time, I find myself floating along, in a tug boat of a career, searching for dry, fertile land and a golden horizon.
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