re: Student loan bubble about to burst

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Perhaps, but it doesn't help when an entire generation was told that without a degree, they would die starving and homeless. I mean, Gen X and Millennials were told that without a degree your job would be "worthless" - and at the age they would go to college, are they supposed to argue with their parents? When their work experience is all of a minimum wage job in a fast food place or retail store?

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Ideals and false propaganda (I always think of the Cosby Show within this subtopic) do not necessitate unfeasible "alternatives" (exorbitant loan debt).

But we don't have them right now.

Anyone can get a government-backed loan that a university takes zero responsibility for meaning they can dish out acceptance letters with no regard for that student's ability or preparedness. Who cares if he or she drops out? Who cares if they never pay back the loan? The entity providing that service already has their cash.

It's a system made to create a bubble.

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I'm selfishly hoping my mountain of debt is somehow washed away in this collapse.

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I wonder if I will get any of my money back for having paid mine off?

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Let me clarify; the Government AT ALL LEVELS needs to stay out of the education LOAN racket

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This. Just like they should stay out of "education" at all levels. Pipe dream, I know, but the truth is that not everyone deserves the accreditation that parses for "education" or even the systematized institution that attempts to support them.

I've had a bad feeling about this ever since I saw how much debt I accrued after my first year of medical school.

Yeah and let's also hope that oil prices collapse even further so it hurts the economy and society of so many people who work in the oil industry and especially in Louisiana.

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when an entire generation was told

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Gen X and Millennials were told that

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are they supposed to argue with their parents?

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When their work experience is all of a minimum wage job

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All I see is excuses and blame cast on others. If someone has the work ethic and wants to pay their loans back, they can easily start over in a new trade and stop pointing fingers at others for their past mistakes. Those who sit around pointing fingers and making excuses are falling behind even faster while their counterparts keep progressing forward.

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WhiskeyPapa

Youre a fricking communist

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Good Citizenship: The Purpose of Education
Eleanor Roosevelt
Publishing Information

Originally published in Pictorial Review, April 1930: 4, 94, 97.

What is the purpose of education? This question agitates scholars, teachers, statesmen, every group, in fact, of thoughtful men and women. The conventional answer is the acquisition of knowledge, the reading of books, and the learning of facts. Perhaps because there are so many books and the branches of knowledge in which we can learn facts are so multitudinous today, we begin to hear more frequently that the function of education is to give children a desire to learn and to teach them how to use their minds and where to go to acquire facts when their curiosity is aroused. Even more all-embracing than this is the statement made not long ago, before a group of English headmasters, by the Archbishop of York, that "the true purpose of education is to produce citizens."


If this is the goal—and in a democracy it would seem at least an important part of the ultimate achievement—then we must examine our educational system from a new point of view.


I am going to ask you to go back with me for a minute some thirty years or more and think of the changes wrought by the last few years.


At that time Theodore Roosevelt's example was for the first time awakening in many young men of America the feeling that their citizenship meant a little more than the privilege of living under the Stars and Stripes, criticizing the conditions of government and the men responsible for its policies and activities, enjoying such advantages as there might be under it, and, if necessary, dying for it in a war which they had had no share in bringing on or in trying to avert.

I do not think I am unfair in saying that in most secondary schools, at least, the teachers of American history in those days laid more emphasis on the battle of Bunker Hill than they did on the obligations of citizenship which the children before them would soon be assuming. And this was largely because they could not teach what they did not understand, and few of them knew or cared what these obligations might be.


Gradually a change has come about. More young men and more young women (since the latter have had the vote) are doing political work. And even if they do not hold political office they have felt the need to understand their own government. In our schools are now given courses in civics, government, economics, current events. Very few children are as ignorant as I was. But there still remains a vast amount to be done before we accomplish our first objective—informed and intelligent citizens, and, secondly, bring about the realization that we are all responsible for the trend of thought and the action of our times.


How shall we arrive at these objectives? We think of course of history as a first means of information. Not the history which is a mere recital of facts, dates, wars, and kings, but a study of the life and growth of other nations, in which we follow the general moral, intellectual, and economic development through the ages, noting what brought about the rise and fall of nations and what were the lasting contributions of peoples now passed away to the development of the human family and the world as a whole."

LINK

Edited.

"Gradually a change has come about. More young men and more young women (since the latter have had the vote) are doing political work. And even if they do not hold political office they have felt the need to understand their own government. In our schools are now given courses in civics, government, economics, current events. Very few children are as ignorant as I was. But there still remains a vast amount to be done before we accomplish our first objective—informed and intelligent citizens, and, secondly, bring about the realization that we are all responsible for the trend of thought and the action of our times."

I don't know how you could say it any better than that.

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This maybe true, but the push to get kids into 4 year colleges are far more focused than it is for trade schools and community colleges.

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I don't necessarily disagree but why can't people think for themselves and make their own decisions?