by Michael Snyder
May 7, 2013
from
EndOfTheAmericanDream Website
College education in the United States has
become a cruel joke.
We endlessly push our high school kids to invest
tens of thousands of dollars and at least four years of their lives to get a
college education because they won’t have any sort of a "future" without it.
So they sign up for decades of debt slavery and spend years listening to
pompous windbags fill their heads with utter nonsense.
The sad truth is that most college courses are a
total joke and they do very little to actually prepare those students for
the real world. I know – I attended public universities in the United States
for eight years.
Most college courses are so easy that the family
dog could pass them. When they finally graduate, our young people discover
that they were lied to all along.
The promised "good jobs" are not there for most
of them, but the huge debts that they committed themselves to will follow
them around permanently. When you are just starting out and you are not
making a lot of money, having to make payments on tens of thousands of
dollars of student loan debt can be absolutely crippling.
This is why I say that college education in
America is a giant money making scam.
Our young people are seduced by the idea of
college being a five year party that will provide an automatic ticket into
the middle class, but the reality is that the only guarantee is that it is a
ticket to serfdom unless you have wealthy parents that are willing to foot
the bill for you.
And bankruptcy laws have been changed to make it
incredibly difficult to get rid of student loan debt, so once you have
signed up for student loan debt slavery you are basically faced with two
choices: either you are going to pay it or you are going to die with it.
Yes, college graduates do make more money and
they do have a lower unemployment rate. But most of them are also burdened
by absolutely suffocating levels of student loan debt that will haunt them
for decades.
So who is really better off?
If you can get someone to pay for your college
education that is great. Because otherwise you are probably getting a rotten
deal.
The following are 29 shocking facts that prove
that college education in America is a giant money making scam…
-
In 1993, the average student loan debt
burden at graduation was
$9,320. Today it is
$28,720.
-
In 1989, only
9 percent of all U.S. households were paying off student loan
debt. Today,
19 percent of all U.S. households are.
-
Young households are being hit
particularly hard by student loan debt. In America today,
40 percent of all households that are led by someone under the
age of 35 are paying off student loan debt. Back in 1989, that
figure was
below 20 percent.
-
According to the Consumer Finance
Protection Bureau, Americans owe
more than a trillion dollars on their student loans.
-
According to the Federal Reserve, the
total amount of student loan debt has increased by a whopping
275 percent since 2003.
-
Approximately
65 percent of all student loan debt is owed by those under the
age of 40.
-
The delinquency rate on student loans is
currently
14 percent and it is steadily rising.
-
The delinquency rate on student loans
for students that attended a "for profit" college is an astounding
23 percent.
-
Today,
34.9 percent of all student loan borrowers under the age of 30
are at least 90 days behind on their student loan payments.
-
Since 1986, the cost of college tuition
has risen by
498 percent.
-
The cost of college textbooks
has tripled over the past decade.
-
The average cost of a four-year college
education is projected to soar to
$120,000 by the year 2015.
-
Back in 1952, a full year of tuition at
Harvard was only $600. Today, it is over
$35,000.
-
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of
New York,
approximately 167,000 Americans currently have more than
$200,000 of student loan debt.
-
At most U.S. colleges and universities,
the quality of the education that you will receive is very poor.
Just check out some numbers about the quality of college education
in the United States from an article that appeared in
USA Today…
-
"After two years in college, 45%
of students showed no significant gains in learning; after
four years, 36% showed little change."
-
"Students also spent 50% less
time studying compared with students a few decades ago"
-
"35% of students report spending
five or fewer hours per week studying alone."
-
"50% said they never took a
class in a typical semester where they wrote more than 20
pages"
-
"32% never took a course in a
typical semester where they read more than 40 pages per
week."
-
One survey found that U.S. college
students spend
24% of their time sleeping, 51% of their time socializing and 7%
of their time studying.
-
Federal statistics reveal that only
36 percent of the full-time students who began college in 2001
received a bachelor’s degree within four years.
-
27 percent of those with student loan debt said that they moved
back in with their parents after college.
-
14 percent of those with student loan debt said that they
delayed marriage because of their student loans.
-
Real earnings for young college
graduates have fallen by
15 percent since the year 2000.
-
If you think that you will be able to
"beat the odds" and land the job of your dreams once you graduate
from college, perhaps you should consider these numbers….
-
In the United States today,
approximately
365,000 cashiers have college degrees.
-
In the United States today,
317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees.
-
In the United States today,
there are
more than 100,000 janitors that have college degrees.
-
The federal government has begun
docking the Social Security payments of elderly Americans that
are behind on their student loan payments…
-
According to government data,
compiled by the Treasury Department at the request of
SmartMoney.com, the federal government is withholding money
from a rapidly growing number of Social Security recipients
who have fallen behind on federal student loans.
From January through August 6,
the government reduced the size of roughly 115,000 retirees’
Social Security checks on those grounds. That’s nearly
double the pace of the department’s enforcement in 2011;
it’s up from around 60,000 cases in all of 2007 and just 6
cases in 2000.
-
According to a survey of 4,900 recent
college graduates,
more than half of them regretted choosing their major or their
school.
-
One poll found that
70% of all college graduates wish that they had spent more time
preparing for the "real world" while they were still in school.
-
48 percent of all recent college graduates have not been able to
find a job in their chosen field.
-
During 2011,
53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor’s degree under the
age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed.
-
According to the ABA, only
56 percent of all law school graduates in 2012 were able to find
a full-time job that requires a law degree.
-
The median student loan burden for
medical school students that graduated in 2012 was
$170,000.
-
Close to half of all recent college graduates are working in
jobs that do not even require a college degree.
When you are overwhelmed by nightmarish student
loan debt that you can never get away from, it can literally take over your
life.
A recent
Businessweek article shared some real life examples of this…
If student loans are good debt, how do you
account for the reaction of Christina Mills, 30, of Minneapolis, when
she found out her payment on college and law school loans would be
$1,400 a month?
"I just went into the car and started
sobbing," says Mills, who works for a nonprofit. "It was more than
my paycheck at the time."
Medical student Thomas Smith, 25, of
Hamilton, N.J., is $310,000 in debt and is struggling to make ends meet
even before beginning to repay his loans.
"I don’t even know what I eat," he says.
"I just go to the supermarket and buy the cheapest thing I can and
buy as much of it as I can."
Then there’s Michael DiPietro, 25, of
Brooklyn, who accumulated about $100,000 in debt while getting a
bachelor’s degree in fashion, sculpture, and performance, and spent the
next two years waiting tables.
He has since landed a fundraising job in the
arts but still has no idea how he will pay back all that money.
"I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s
an obsolete idea that a college education is like your golden
ticket," DiPietro says.
What about you...?
