Guess what folks? That’s right, it’s time to talk about student loan debt again. Yay!!! Time for this column to highlight, once again, why student loan debt is one of our nation’s biggest problems. We’ve featured a lot of articles on this issue. Like this one, and this one. Why? Because we think there’s something rotten in Denmark with this problem.
Every time we do a story on student debt, we get a certain amount of yahoos who put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the students. They write stupid things like, “The students shouldn’t have paid X amount of dollars for (fill in what the commenter says is a useless degree here).” First of all, a kid who wants to go to college to get a so called unmarketable degree should still not have to go 40 thousand dollars in debt to get it. It’s fucking obscene and wrong, and as a society we’re pretty shitty for allowing it to happen and get worse. Also, comments like that fail to acknowledge how ridiculous it is that the cost of going to school has gone through the fucking roof.
25 years ago, unless you were going to school to become a doctor, lawyer, or to get a STEM degree, student loan debt was not only manageable, but reasonable. I went to state college in 1994, and only knew a handful of students with student loan debt, and it was low. Nothing they stressed about. We have a great article on Friday on this issue. Before you read it, check out this clip about what happens if students simply don’t pay their ransom notes. Sorry, I mean student loan bills.