Best Advice: Stay Out of Debt

$1 trillion student loan debt widens US wealth gap

I have written about this before. There is a problem. Let's take a look at the data.

According to the statistics from BLS.gov on median earnings, you will earn $23,764 a year more if you have a Bachelor's degree compared to your high school graduate counterpart. (Don't take this to be prescriptive though.)

According to this CNNMoney article, the average school-related debt by 2013 graduates is around $35,200. Just read some of the comments..."12% of graduates, regretted their decisions entirely, saying their college education didn't justify the debt burden." That's awful. How were they duped into this (rhetorical)?

CNNMoney isn't trying to scare monger, they offer pretty good advice here.

Why am I pointing this out? There's a problem. Mainstream media says there's a problem. Now what is the root? I say the idea that "you have to go to college" is one of the problems. I think we should replace it with the idea that "you have to count the cost of going to college" which includes the idea of adequate preparation and the possibility of a 'no build' option. (If you are bristling about the idea of a 'no build' option right now, you are making my point.)

The idea that everyone has to go to college leads to high demand...hence rising tuition costs. It leads to the thinking "if statistics show people whom have higher levels of education make more on average, I should seek the highest levels of education"...which brings us to the original article to which I've linked. The number of jobs for PhD's isn't going to change simply based on more people getting PhD's, so all it will result in is that more people have a PhD level of college debt without the PhD level of pay that they were counting on having with which to pay it off. These people are debtor-slaves.

How do you take the people with the greatest potential and marginalize them? Enslave them to college debt. That's the most sinister thing about the issue. Is it driven from that viewpoint? It doesn't have to be. It may be an unintended consequence of poor policies, but that doesn't make it any less heinous.

Oh, and we've only talked about the college graduates. What about those who do not graduate?