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Excessive Debt Has Turned Today's Students Into Serfs


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excessive-debt-turns-students-into-serfs.htmInvestors Business Daily:

Ancient Sparta turned its conquered neighbors into indentured serfs — half-free, half- slave. The resulting Helot underclass produced the food for Sparta, freeing Sparta's elite males to train for war and the duties of citizenship.

Over the last few decades, we've created our modern version of these Helots — millions of indebted young Americans with little prospect of finding permanent well-paying work, servicing their enormous college debts or reaping commensurate financial returns on their costly educations.

Student-loan debts now average about $25,000 per graduating senior. But the percentage of youths 16 to 24 who are working (about 49%) is the lowest since records have been kept.

The cost of a four-year college education can range between $100,000 and $200,000. Only 53% of today's college students graduate within six years. Student time spent writing and reading in college has plummeted.

Tuition keeps rising, as it has for 50 years, usually at close to twice the rate of inflation. It must, if colleges are to pay for a vast new administrative class that is excused from teaching to monitor sensitivity and diversity, raise money, and comply with ever more race/class/gender federal mandates.

In addition, students support a new grandee class of professors who teach lighter loads, enjoy better benefits, retire earlier — and now offer instruction in a vast array of courses and disciplines that simply were never part of the traditional curriculum.

If today's indebted students graduate later and are trained to be more "socially aware," they also have diminished writing skills, fewer facts at their command, and less practical ability to survive in the private sector.

So the higher-education paradox continues: borrowing more for a less valuable, more politicized education that takes longer, with waning ability to pay off the ever-greater debt.

Often, first- and second-year students will take most of their classes from the new legions of part-time lecturers, who are on yearly contracts without much in the way of job security, pensions, benefits or status, and who subsidize the light teaching loads of the far better paid.Scissors-32x32.png

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I have interviewed college grads for specifically chemical engineering positions for maybe 10 or 15 years now. As years go asking about courses they've taken I hear " They don't require that anymore" or "we can pick one or the other on that course requirement." Yet, they have to get more liberal arts credits to get north of 120 credits for their engineering degree.

 

Not too surprising. Paying much more for a lesser education.

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clearvision

It scares me because when I went to UTexas you could still work your way through with the help of "lower middle class" parents and no loans. Now either your parents have saved 100K or you get scholarships, OR you borrow so much you are in debt for 20 years.

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