[Daniel_Plainview]

Students: You Are Exploited Debt-Serfs

Students and parents, wake up: your only salvation lies in political engagement and action.

Of all the exploitative systems in the U.S., none is more rapacious than the Education Cartel. Like the proverbial frog that is unaware that it's being boiled because the water temperature rises so gradually, college students and their parents are unable to recall what higher education was like before students were herded into debt-serfdom.

Apologists for the Education Cartel like to blame Corporate America or the banks, but the reality is that the Federal and State governments and the employees of the Cartel are willing partners in the exploitation and fraud. How did we get to the boiling-water point where students are expected to take on $100,000 or more in debt to attend college--even a mediocre one?

Answer: immensely profitable Government-backed loans. If the Central State wasn't partnered with the Education Cartel, today's debt-serfdom would be impossible.

The partnership plays out on multiple levels. The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported that "Liberal" U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi is fighting vigorously to defend the debt-serf-based empires of for-profit "colleges." Why? because these billion-dollar empires give her hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions (duh!).

("Conservatives" love for-profit "colleges" for the same reasons, of course.)

There is nothing remotely educational or liberal about an exploitative Cartel that provides no measurable value to its students while graduating 10% of them. As reported in The New Republic, when General Accounting Office (GAO) investigators posing as prospective students applied to 15 major for-profit "colleges," every one made misleading sales pitches.

The largest for-profit, the University of Phoenix, graduates less than 10% of its students within 10 years.

You may not get any useful skills or a meaningful diploma, but you will end up with $100,000 in debt that can never be written off. Loans imply risk: nobody forces a lender to take on the risk of lending money to a borrower. If the borrower ends up being unable to pay his debts and declares bankruptcy, the debt is wiped off the books and the lender loses the money that was at-risk.

Thanks to the Central State's partnership with the Education Cartel, student loans cannot be dismissed even in bankruptcy. This makes them unique in the world of credit and debt.

Banks lobbied the Central State for guaranteed, no-risk student loans, and the Government was pleased to oblige. The Status Quo fully supports colonizing the "home" population of vulnerable students and turning them into debt-serfs that banks can hound til death and beyond; they're much more pliable and less troublesome than foreign populations who might rebel against the Imperial lash. (This is drawn directly from the Survival+ critique.)

The Education Cartel has mastered the art of propaganda. You can read hundreds of media stories on the plight of K-12 education in the U.S., and the only salary numbers you will find are those for entry-level teachers--usually poverty-level wages below $30,000 in low-income states and in the mid-$30,000s in coastal states.

Charles Hugh Smith (Of Two Minds)

The trillion-dollar student loan bubble is about to burst ... and when it does, it will take down the hugely bloated education bubble.

[Daniel_Plainview]

How different would the picture look if students were given FULL INFORMATION and FULL DISCLOSURE regarding peak oil, peak energy, peak resources, etc., (together with the inevitable decline in economic growth and future job prospects resulting therefrom) BEFORE they signed onto $100K in student loan debt.

Instead of FULL DISCLOSURE, the government hides the truth, and willingly allows students to enter into perpetual debt slavedom, knowing that there will be no hope of debt repayment once the steep decline of peak oil ensues ...

[DrGray]

How different would the picture look if students were given FULL INFORMATION and FULL DISCLOSURE regarding peak oil, peak energy, peak resources, etc., (together with the inevitable decline in economic growth and future job prospects resulting therefrom) BEFORE they signed onto $100K in student loan debt.

It would certainly look different to me. I found out the hard way and 4 years too late that racking up 200K+ was complete idiocracy, especially given the current economic picture with peak oil and everything else.

When you are applying to colleges, all you can think about is getting accepted. That is the end all be all to your future. Costs are something that you will deal with in the future and as long as someone's handing you money now, what does it matter?! Stupid thinking, yes. But these are young, impressionable, unwise to the world kids that are being told this is the way to success and not to worry. They are being fleeced!

I warn all students that come my way looking to get accepted to a professional school that they need to understand the implications of debt and whether their tunnel vision to get accepted is worth the money they will owe. In my mind it is not.

[JessiRhea]

Whatever happened to "Learn A Trade"? These days kids are told from all sides that you MUST go to college to be successful. In some ways I was lucky that my mother didn't give a damn what happened to me so education wasn't really a priority. But when I quit highschool at 15 (best thing I ever did, by the way), I asked my stepdad if I could apprentice at the carpentry shop where he'd worked for 40 years, and he told me no. He basically told me that, as smart as I was supposed to be, I should go to college and get a high-paying job. I think he also didn't want me to go into carpentry because I'm female. But now, 10 years later, I wish to God he'd let me learn (I've learned what I could on my own, but not enough to land a job). Because here I am, a laborer, earning way below the poverty line, and if I only knew a trade like carpentry I would have much more diverse employment opportunities. If the economy is good, I could make a chunk of money, and even if it's not I could at least use my skills to further my own interests homesteading-wise.

Now, my husband grew up in a family that did prioritize education, and he went to college and got a degree. But he's in the same boat as me. His degree is doing nothing for him; however it did score him an assistant manager position at a Subway sandwich shop about 8 years ago. There are so many people out there who have degrees under their belts that aren't helping them for shit. All they have to show for it is debt. Whatever happened to getting out of highschool, learning a trade that actually produces tangible goods or services that are needed and useful, getting a little house and being happy with one's life? I agree that the whole college culture is one that leads to debt slavery. Sure, some people can and should go for higher education. But NOT EVERYONE needs to go to college. It's overemphasized in our culture today, and it's unnecessary.

[vision-master]

Then again, my father wuz from the depression era and it wuz amazing @ what he could do. He handed down many skills to us kids. To this day, he wuz my greatest teacher along with my high school ski coach. I think what has happened with many young ppl today is, parents today don't know those skills from the depression era generation and see the only way to success with a collage degree.

[gollum]

I don't think education is bad if it gets you a skill like being a nurse, welder, mechanic etc. but there has to be a defined goal other than being "smart". I always say if ya wanna be smart, watch the god damned history channel! I can't count the amount of people I know who have degrees in history, biology etc that either receive no economic benefit from the degree or a benefit that was useless in comparison to the costs incurred.

[davep]

To this day, he wuz my greatest teacher along with my high school ski coach.

I'm not sure I want to know the answer, but what did your ski coach teach you?

[vision-master]

To go for it, in whatever you wish.

Ended up alpine ski racing for decades. lsol

[Loki]

The trillion-dollar student loan bubble is about to burst ... and when it does, it will take down the hugely bloated education bubble.

The linked article was a bit heavy on conspiracy theory for me (vastly oversimplified), but I agree with your statement above. Funny how no one has talked about it much, but student loan debt is far worse than mortgage or credit card debt, as you can't declare bankruptcy. It follows you to your grave.

If I could go back in time and change one thing about my decisions as a young adult, it would be to avoid student loan debt like the plague. I hope the student loan industry pops like a big fat zit, the sooner the better.

[Sixstrings]

Whatever happened to "Learn A Trade"?

Yup.

The education vampire squid cartel has screwed things up in this country, actually made us less productive and flexible than we could be. It's been a very long process.

In the "old days" people could easily change jobs. If you could write, even if you were self-educated, then just on the merits of what you can do you could get a job with a newspaper. Then you needed a BA. Then a BA in communications or journalism. Now you really need a masters.

Every field was like this.. an intelligent man used to be able to apprentice to a lawyer. If he could pass the bar and do the job, he was in.

The only fields that should require a sheepskin are the hard sciences, engineering, and medical.

But it's so bad these days that you actually have people taking on twenty or thirty thousand dollars debt just for culinary school. Now these are jobs that are famously low wage, we're talking $10 - $13 an hour range. That's if these debt-ridden grads can outcompete the guatamalan illegal immigrants in the first place -- they'll work for even less and never complain.

Companies don't want to train anymore, forget apprenticeships. We have a situation here where the average adult will have to change career fields five times or more, yet "education" is required every time they switch -- so that's more debt, more money for the education cartel. And then when the economy turns to recession / depression, here these grads are stuck with bad debt they can't pay off.

It's a mess. The only way our system can work is the European model -- if you require education for everything, then it HAS to be free or easily affordable. Compounding debt at each career change is just permanent debt slavery.

One last example.. a lot of the medical fields. You used to be able to apprentice for something like dental assisting. You still can in some states, but not many. Also nurses, LPN's, CNA's.. there's no good reason why they can't apprentice to those fields.

Bottom line.. the more obsessed we get with specialized education for every little job right down to cooks, the less flexible and more vulnerable our economy is overall. I wonder what they do in China.. I bet they don't have cooks with $30k student loan debt.

[teotwawki]

Higher education is a scam, the marginal cost per student to the University is close to zero dollars and yet they charge an arm and a leg for this crap.

I go to the cheapest "value" University around, and it still costs be 4000+ per semester and that is just tuition not including books or anything else. It is ridiculous. They are making a profit on my parking (we pay expensive parking stickers) on my food (the cafeteria is more expensive than outside) and they are doing this robin hood crap where a percentage of my tuition fee goes to less fortunate students... (didn't know we lived in a socialism) I go to class, go home. Most of the time I don't even attend class unless it is on an exam day or something important. Basically I just occupy a chair... and that is all. I "cost" the University absolutely nothing and yet they are making a huge profit off of me... I teach myself the knowledge I need to know by reading the textbooks that I purchased and bought off of Amazon. So really the only use of an University is to "hand hold" and make us "jump through hoops" and then print that fancy diploma at the end of the hola hooping.

In modern times, wealth is correlated with energy availability and energy consumption. Energy is the only real wealth. With the advent of the steam engine and the beginning of industrial age we witnessed the average living standard skyrocket. Was this because all of a sudden we all had X amount more hours in a day? No, it was automation coupled with the use of energy dense resource substitutes (coal, oil, etc instead of raw muscle and back breaking labor) that allowed us to increase our GDP by orders of magnitude!

Because of the many fold increase in productivity, labor shifted from manual to skilled. People were freed from the menial tasks or back breaking hard labor and instead to do "number pushing" and other more intellectual 'work'. Instead of being the machines (manual labor), we commanded the machines. In the informational age this process was further accelerated by leveraging the microprocessor to perform 'intellectual' tasks that would have taken humans months to calculate manually by hand.

We found out that "microchip" processors could assist us at commanding machines better than we could do it using raw brainpower alone. As long as raw resources and energy supply was able to keep up with pace, this electronic efficiency increased once again total productivity and boosted living standards across the board.

The irony and dilemma that we are witnessing today is that although there is no shortage of highly educated people with intellectual skill-sets, there is no longer the demand in the markets to prop up the jobs that put these skilled people to work. This is a reflection of our global resource depletion and the inability of our species to continue its expansion efforts. While we may be in the information age, we never really left the industrial age.

So ironically, it actually makes sense why education is so expensive. TPTB designed it that way just as they designed CDOs. There is more money than actual resources and they don't want the population to find out or the jig is up.. so the education scam is really so that the masses have some "investment" to put their monies into and so they forgo spending that on real and tangible items like cars, shopping, etc and thereby consuming real resources and causing us to collapse faster.

So TPTB might have logic behind the seemingly madness.

[Cid_Yama]

OK, here is the way out for those of you who own nothing more than your home and one car per adult.

Default and get your wages garnished. They can take a maximum of 15% of your wages.

Most are paying more than that, making the payments.

There is a pecking order in regards to that 15%. IRS gets first dibs, followed by Dept of Education. By defaulting on your loan it goes back to the Dept of Education.

Any and every other creditor in the world must stand in line behind the Dept of Education to get a crack at that 15%.

In other words, until that student loan is paid off through the garnished 15%, no other creditor can touch you. That student loan gives you debt immunity.

Once you are garnished by the Dept of Education, your income tax returns will not be levied as you are making payments.

The worst thing they can do to you, may be the best thing that can happen to you.

We figured this out trying to help the daughter of a friend of ours who had nothing and was never going to have anything. Now she actually has a life. She was paying far more in student loan payments than they could legally take if she defaulted.

(I know they came to me hoping I would bail her out, but I'm not that easy.)

[evilgenius]

Well, I am not going to trash the concept of education. Instead I would like to point out that there are cheaper alternatives to get educated than the most expensive universities. First, there are community colleges. Second there are state schools. Often the cost of these can be covered with a Pell grant or savings. What is transpiring is not a rush to the gates of higher education, it is a rush to the most prestigious gates. Anybody who gets into trouble because they paid four or more times the cost for something that would have fit them just as well if gotten locally deserves at least some of the heat that they face if they get into debt and can't pay it off. You see, the local institutions are subject to so much more kvetching from concerned citizens that they tend to be a lot cheaper, and offer mostly the same education.

That being said many students still choose to take out loans. Mostly they do this for one of two reasons. They either are enticed by the idea of 'free' money not attached to any work, or they want to graduate on a schedule. Nobody can help those who become so enamored with free that they lose themselves temporarily. As for the other sort, though, you can choose to graduate according to your own plan. There is no need to take five classes a semester such that there is no way you could take on a part-time job.

[diemos]

Well, I am not going to trash the concept of education.

In the film "Good Will Hunting" the guy serving drinks to the students from Harvard laughs at them and tells them that for a few bucks at a second hand book shop he could get the same education that they were paying through the nose for at Harvard.

That's true, but the one thing you don't get is the piece of paper that hiring decisions are made on.

Modern universities are exploiting their role as gate keepers to the high paying jobs to extract as much money from students as possible.

For a majority of students, if they paid up front for their diploma and went to work without learning anything it would make no difference in the long run.

[EnergyUnlimited]

We figured this out trying to help the daughter of a friend of ours who had nothing and was never going to have anything. Now she actually has a life. She was paying far more in student loan payments than they could legally take if she defaulted.

(I know they came to me hoping I would bail her out, but I'm not that easy.)

She must be really ugly...

[dsula]

Higher education is a scam, the marginal cost per student to the University is close to zero dollars and yet they charge an arm and a leg for this crap.

Higher eduction is pretty cool. IF you're smart enough to study the right thing. But most people are not. They study women psychology or art or history AND expect a good paying job. Womens psychology? Give me a break.

[dsula]

Any and every other creditor in the world must stand in line behind the Dept of Education to get a crack at that 15%.

What ever happend to responsability? Buy what you can afford? Instead of stealing it by defaulting on your promises?

[Oneaboveall]

Higher education is a scam, the marginal cost per student to the University is close to zero dollars and yet they charge an arm and a leg for this crap.

Higher eduction is pretty cool. IF you're smart enough to study the right thing. But most people are not. They study women psychology or art or history AND expect a good paying job. Women's psychology? Give me a break.

Is anyone else on here horrified by this attitude?

[FairMaiden]

I don't think education is bad if it gets you a skill like being a nurse, welder, mechanic etc. but there has to be a defined goal other than being "smart". I always say if ya wanna be smart, watch the god damned history channel! I can't count the amount of people I know who have degrees in history, biology etc that either receive no economic benefit from the degree or a benefit that was useless in comparison to the costs incurred.

This couldn't be farther from the truth - you can watch all the history channel you want and it's not going to make you "smart". It might help you to increase your base of knowledge but I don't see that as smart. Smart is doing things like paying for your education up front, getting the least amount of it to succeed in your field and making yourself diverse. All things that I have done and I have fared very well. Granted, had I specialized and done 2 more years of schooling I might have an opportunity to make more $...but I'm not convinced I'd like what I was doing...it's been my experience that you are either smart or you are not. You *can* be intellectual through learning and increasing your knowledge base (my husband is a perfect example of this - he is not smart but intellectual). Some few of us are lucky in that we are smart AND intellectual...I can even be quite clever when I put my mind to it. Tho, that combo is why I question the PTB and the status quo so it's a too much kind of thing, LOL.