(Photo: A young man holds up a dollar sign during an Occupy Wall Street rally against the high cost of college tuition April 25, 2012 in New York. Scores of students and former students gathered to complain about the high cost of tuition and college loans. April 25th marked the day when US student debt reached USD 1 trillion. )
Student loan debt is now at $1 trillion and climbing at a rate I am told by Peter Coy, Bloomberg Businessweek, of $3000.00 per second. The average college graduate bears $25,000 debt upon graduation, and it is not rare to find a professional graduate with $60-130 thousand in debt. Education debt is clearly a bubble that cannot be sustained, with what I am told is 15% now in default. The Obama administration remedy is to declare that it will cut the student loan in half (unexplained) and move 2 million onto community college rolls (unexplained). American Crossroads is aiming at the students who voted for OFA in 2008 who are now underwater and either jobless or well underemployed. My observation is that student debt load is ruinous even to the to the high-income careers that do manage to get started, and that there must be a debt forgiveness fix of some type in future. For now, loading more debt onto the young in exchange for the promise of an income that can pay off the debt is wickedness. Spoke Peter Coy re the remedies suggested include truth-in-lending caveats that come with college acceptance letters, that are listed with each course credit, so that you can see the debts incurred for this course, what comparable students have done to pay back this debt, what is the prospect of paying off a course on French lit or ceramics? Richard Epstein, Hoover, speaks well of for-profit colleges that shape the degree toward a profession that pays, where there are jobs, such as health workers or financial workers. I am lucky to have two college age children, and I know the facts of what it takes to pay for higher education in America and overseas. If Mr. Romney has solution, I am most eager to hear it. So far, Mr.Romney's quick recommendation -- borrow from your parents -- is not unwise; but this does not answer the tuition inflation, not does it confront the fact that higher education has little restraint on raising prices as long as it can offload the costs to the student borrowers.