A generation ago it was common knowledge that a college diploma was an excellent investment that assured a lifetime of financial success. It's a tough sell to convince people that in these days of party schools, education optional colleges, outrageously high tuition rates and crippling debt that the cost of a college degree can ruin students' lives.
However, the information backing up that theory continues to increase by the day. Graduates have $100,000 in student debt. College alumni work in temp jobs, delivering pizzas and working as clerks. In the latest blow to the party school industry is the revelation of how many people living in poverty have a diploma hanging on their walls.
The Institute for Higher Education Policy found that 47 percent of young people living in poverty had attended college and 11 percent had graduated.
You can read the New York Times story about it here: "Many Young Adults in Poverty Have a College Degree."
The report said poor students go to college academically unprepared, and, amid competing family and work obligations, they accumulate debt "that could have been avoided by pursuing a different type of degree or a credential."
There it is folks! Paying off those college loans is putting alumni in the poor house! These students should never have been sent to college, the report says, because they are unprepared for the work and most of them eventually drop out, leaving them with no diploma and a big bill.
Who's to blame for this? Colleges enroll as many students as they can because it helps their bottom line. Freshmen are stacked into dorms like cord wood, four students to a room designed for two. They know most of these kids won't make it, but they don't care. These are students ready to take out big loans to pay the excessive costs of higher education. That's money in the bank to greedy college administrators.
What sense does it make to send 70 percent of high school grads to college when half of them drop out? Add to that the crippling levels of debt and you have the makings of a crisis. Or a bubble about to burst.
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