College Costs Hobble a Generation

We already know that college student loans in America are now equal to all outstanding credit card debt...which approaches a trillion dollars.

A couple of questions for you....what happens when millions of college kids have billions of dollars that they can't repay? And a follow up question....what happens when millions of college kids can't find (or won't find) a job and start to get upset with "the system"?

Of course OCCUPY WALL STREET is just the start of what will happen.

We have been saying for some time now that easy money into ANY segment of the economy will cook a bubble and we all know that bubbles eventually all have to pop.

We may be close to the popping part.

With more than $1 trillion in student loans outstanding in this country, crippling debt is no longer confined to dropouts from for-profit colleges or graduate students who owe on many years of education, some of the overextended debtors in years past. Today, nearly everyone pursuing a bachelor’s degree is borrowing. As prices soar, a college degree statistically remains a good lifetime investment, but it often comes with an unprecedented financial burden.

“If one is not thinking about where this is headed over the next two or three years, you are just completely missing the warning signs,” said Rajeev V. Date, deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal watchdog created after the financial crisis.

Much like the mortgage brokers who promised pain-free borrowing to homeowners a few years back, many colleges don’t offer warnings about student debt in the glossy brochures and pitch letters mailed to prospective students. Instead, reading from the same handbook as for-profit colleges, they urge students not to worry about the costs. That is because most students don’t pay full price.

Hagan, 23, is also a college student. She will graduate shortly from Malone University, an evangelical college in Canton, Ohio, with more than $65,000 in student debt (among her loans is one from a farm lender; she had to plant a garden to become eligible). Although she makes $60,000 a year as a state representative, she plans to begin waiting tables in the next few weeks at Don Pancho’s, a Mexican restaurant in Alliance, Ohio, to help pay down her student loans and credit cards. She pays about $1,000 a month.

Here; http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/may/13/tp-as-college-prices-soar-a-generation-is-hobbled/?page=1#article

$1000 per month for student loans for the next 15-20 years? Honestly...what were these kids thinking? Honestly....what were the adults thinking that let them sign on the dotted line and told them everything would be OK after they got a degree?

More Wall Street fraud and stupidity all the way around. We will all feel this bubble when it pops.