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Higher education: today's greatest scam? |
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Posted 4/25/2011 at 1:32 PM by Jasmin M |
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The college degree is something that I have been looking on lately with disdain. During a workshop on capitalism that I attended, the presenter mentioned briefly that student debt would soon become the next housing crisis. It wasn't the first or last time I'd hear that.
Today I happened upon an article from n+1 called Bad Education. In it, the author discusses the same topic: higher education debt is about to get us all in some serious trouble.
| With fewer and fewer students having the income necessary to pay back loans (except through the use of more consumer debt), a massive default looks closer to inevitable. |
The article also talks about how much of a scam a college degree has become. Tuition costs have been rising steadily for years, much higher than rates of inflation. But that money isn't going to instruction or student services. It's going to administrators and administration costs.
When President Obama spoke in the State of the Union of the need to send more Americans to college, it was in the context of economic competition with China, phrased as if we ought to produce graduates like steel. As the near-ubiquitous unpaid internship for credit (in which students pay tuition in order to work for free) replaces class time, the bourgeois trade school supplants the academy. Parents understandably worried about their children make sure they never forget about the importance of an attractive résumé. It was easier for students to believe a college education was priceless when it wasn’t bought and sold from every angle.
If tuition has increased astronomically and the portion of money spent on instruction and student services has fallen, if the (at very least comparative) market value of a degree has dipped and most students can no longer afford to enjoy college as a period of intellectual adventure, then at least one more thing is clear: higher education, for-profit or not, has increasingly become a scam. |
To make matters worse, bankruptcy is not an option for those with student loan debt, and the debt never expires. Unlike other forms of debt, there is no way to escape the debt which supposedly necessary to get us ahead in life.
I highly recommend this article to everyone, whether you're looking at college, a college graduate, or just want to learn more. Because I can see this issue becoming extremely important soon.
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE |
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