From article,
Kelli Space, 23, graduated from Northeastern University in 2009 with a bachelor’s in sociology — and a whopping $200,000 in student loan debt. Space, who lives with her parents and works full-time, put up a Web site called TwoHundredThou.com soliciting donations to help meet her debt obligation, which is $891 a month. That number jumps to $1,600 next November.
Regardless of your stance on student loan justice, the question that is never raised is who in their right mind would give a $200,000 loan to a twenty year old sociology major in absence of federal subsidies and government shelters for student loans? College is no longer an investment in your future; it’s 21st century indentured servitude!
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And they are afraid of the injustice that would occur ‘when the free market is allowed to run unchecked’ by gov’t regulation.
Who in their right mind would pay $200,000 to major in sociology? I would venture to guess that the rational behind the issuance of student loans is in many ways similar to that which was behind the issuance of many home loans. There are incentives banks have to issue those types of loans, and it may include government protection. For example, declaring bankruptcy, as far as I know, does not rescue you from your student loans. So, for banks, student loans are more or less secure, barring radical inflation.
In any case, this really says something about the state of current society, where someone feels the need to pay that much money for what amounts to a worthless degree (relative to what she paid for it). I mean, even in my case, if I decide to take on the responsibility, it will cost me at present price at least $12,000 to complete my college education (at a cheap, subsidized state university) and “ideally” (at a better state subsidized university) ~$20,000. That’s for two years, and at present prices. In California at least, prices are increasing quarter/semester by quarter/semester. To the degree that I want to pay this off with wages earned, this is time taken away from school presently added to school in the future, meaning given the way that the price of class is packaged way cost me even more. Then, we need to factor in interest (since the likelihood is that I am not going to pay anything off until after college).
I think that in my case my degree(s) will give me a better foundation to search for jobs that will pay me enough to make payments, but even in my case there is no assurance of anything.
The student loan swindle is not substantially different from the one French describes in Walk Away. Statists have sold people on the idea of college and mortgages for all.
They used these twin cultural prejudices to enslave us.
The real joke comes when you look back at the older propaganda they once used to sell this slavery, when the mantra was all about making them “affordable.”. Ha! A 2,000% price increase is not what I’d call making something affordable.
Education, housing, and health care: All utterly devastated in much the same way, by state involvement coupled with a general sense of entitlement.
You’re right; we should go back to the class system where only the inherently wealthy can have those things and the rest exist to provide services to them.
Yes Wick, because that is the only other possible way to organize society. What you are doing is called “False Dichotomy”, where you present only two alternatives and try to force a choice between them. Socialists like you and President Obama specialize in this kind of muddle headed thinking.
Seek Knowledge Not Obsolete Degrees.
Alertness, that is, the entrepreneurial spirit will lead true seekers after knowledge in another direction – for example, in the direction of the Mises Academy. With knowledge that is based on reality these individuals will be able to productively find their way into the world of commerce.
Those individuals just plodding along in a state of latent entrepreneurship will find themselves occupied with the burden of obsolete (mostly erroneous) ‘knowledge,’ dependent on others to support their latency.
Yeah, there really is a huge correction in higher education (all eduaction, really) coming soon. Universities have all overbuilt, from buildings to tenured faculty. Classic example of malinvestment during boom times………………
Unfortunately, “seeking knowledge” doesn’t put bread on the table.
And many of those who “seek knowledge” seem to forget that they would never even have been afforded the luxury of doing it at all, debt or no, had markets not been nominally freed over the past 200 or so years. Shame those same knowledge seekers are actively trying to knock the whole thing down.
Seeking knowledge is what does ‘put bread on the table.’
Perhaps in the holistic sense, but definitely not from the individual’s perspective.
Test this by negating it: ignorance and latency puts bread on the table!
Well if it isn’t my good old friend the “either or” fallacy.
Negating you say?
the absence of ignorance or the absence of latency puts bread on the table?
I don’t see how you go from “absence of ignorance” a passive state of being, into “seeking knowledge” that is an obvious active engagement.
This is what ‘usury’ is.
Give people who don’t know better way to much money they turn them into virtual slaves for the rest of their lives.
Here is the modern recipe the banks want for economic recovery:
* Give every couple a 250,000 dollar house, 20 thousand dollars in credit card debt, and 2 SUVs.
* Train them the from early childhood that not only this consumerism is good, it’s their ultimate goal in life, their credit score is their value to society, that it’s all part of the American dream, and they would look like redneck assholes if they lived any other way.
* And then tell them they will get rewarded after they turn 65 (afterlife) if they just invest everything they make back into the banking system.
If you convince people of that then they will go into debt up to their eyeballs early in life (as quickly as possible in most cases through student loans) and will forsake all other for your profitability. They will put their kids into ‘preschool’ when they are 6 months old, work multiple jobs. Forsake their kids, their relationships, their families, their sanity, their health their happiness… all to increase your profits by working themselves to death just to keep from making late credit card payments.
The TRUE American Dream was to be independently wealthy. To own land that required no payments to anybody. Enough wealth invested and working for you that you can work when you feel like it, do the job the way you want and how you want. Life on YOUR terms. Liberty. The ability to say to somebody “Take this job and shove it” with minimal risk.
THAT Is the true ‘American Dream’.
This bullshit consumerism and debt culture is a lie, a distortion. It was never about having a nice house with a picket fence. It was about independence and you choosing to live life on your own terms.
One of the most disgusting things I seen when taking classes at a University is that _literally_ on the way to class there was racks of credit card applications. IN THE HALLWAY of the educational buildings. NOT in the shop. But in the the fucking liberal arts building or the sciences building itself.
This is predatory.
Of course this lady is a moron for paying 200K for something so completely and utterly worthless. Seriously: WTF was she thinking?
I’m cutting and pasting your rant. Hope ya don’t mind. Thanks.
Oh. And BTW.
Student loans have special rules and protections against the consumer that regular loans do not have. That is they can go and engage in debt collection methods and other things that would be illegal for normal loans. It’s almost impossible to get out from underneath them.
For example: you can’t include student loans in your bankruptcy. Student loans are ineligible for discharge in bankruptcy
This is what would help explain why she was able to get such a loan while she was so obviously clueless and likely to default.
That’s because student loans are entirely a Federal government thing. Private student loans were made illegal in the health care bill.
Not that any banker in his right mind would provide such a loan without the government to back it up. With the exception of certain specific degrees (most of the engineerings for example), no banker in his right mind would loan kids money for college.
And that would be a good thing.
No kidding. I held down a full time job while getting my degree. I was almost immediately snatched up right after I graduated. How many fresh BS graduates do you see with 4+ years work experience? Also paid for every semester in cash, thanks to that very job.
Honestly working during school is the best thing for a young person. I am getting my graduate degree in the evenings while working and our evening program is getting criticism from the full-time students because we’re taking their jobs. I am also paying for grad school in cash-money. So I will likely graduate more employable and less in debt.
I remember 15 years ago when I was still in high school, you’d always get “you can be whatever you want if you get a degree” hammered into your skull. I bet it’s still the same today. This ridiculous situation (I won’t be opening my wallet to this fool) is courtesy of your feel-good public education system. It’s high time people realize that even hard work and good grades won’t lead anywhere if you make a stupid decision up front.
I wonder if public school teachers know any better (not that that makes it OK). Child labor laws prevent any kind of meaningful work until late high school. If your next stop is college and an education degree, then straight into a public school position, where are they suppose to learn anything about the private sector or how markets work? Truly scary………
Agreed. But what can you expect? You, an inexperienced kid, are being advised and taught by a staff of adults who went to school and got “certified,” and, like anybody, gauge success on their own experience. They succeeded in living off the backs of the productive sector by unionizing, state-monopolizing, and calling it all “good for the children.” What, then, should they advise others in doing? Public education firmly reinforces the many schemes of “something for nothing” – both tacitly and explicitly.
Self education – that’s the only game in town as far as I’m concerned.
She spent $200,000 to learn about class and gender warfare that don’t exist and how gender and race are socially constructed phenomena. And now she wants the public to pick up her tab. Typical.
lol.
I work at the campus library while attending grad school. There are weekly tours of elementary-school-aged children stomping through the library (especially minority kids). From youth, everyone has it constantly pounded into their heads that ‘degree => success’. I guarantee you this is exactly what happened to this girl. She figured all she needed to do was obtain a degree and she’d be good to go. So she picked something easy and that she was kind of interested in. Now she’s graduated with enormous debt and no marketable skills.
I saw some statistic somewhere where it was estimated that 50% of graduates who are employed are working jobs that don’t require college degrees.
And who do you think came up with those statistics?? Statistics is one skill you aquire in a sociology degree. Marketable skills include demographics, teaching, counselling, research, politics, economics, religion.. must I continue?
I learned statistics while taking calculus for engineering courses. Teaching is not something you get taught, it’s something you do because you know a subject well. Counseling is something you do because you’re an empathetic human, not because you paid a professor to tell you how to do it. Anyone can research, it’s called Google. Politics? So they’re teaching you how to lie, cheat, and steal in schools now? Economics, I’ve learned more on the subject just reading this website than any university could possibly teach me. Religion is something you learn on your own, via your own convictions, not by paying someone to tell you how to think.
There is nothing worthwhile in a sociology degree. The skills are either part of some field that’s far more useful, something that you either know or don’t and can’t be taught, or can be found more effectively in free alternatives.
Ah, but for a revised Theory of Education in the United States. I’m sure Mr. Nock might have a word or two to say regarding this situation in “higher education”. Now, irrespective of its false foundations, the theory persists with full state sanction permitting that lower sort of exploiter to deliver a life not well lived for the uneducable. Truly sickening.
This is rich. A bunch of people who rant all day about exploitation of the poor charge 200 thousand borrowed dollars so people can listen to those rants.You can get the same “education” for free by hanging out with the creepy guys at a used book store. At least then you won’t have to put up with the hypocrisy.
Peter Schiff interviewed this girl last week on hos radio show. Check it out on schiffradio.com
Yeah, in that interview he endorsed skipping college and just putting a fake degree on your resume because “no one will check it out anyway”. Hooray for principled libertarianism!
Most workplaces won’t check unless the degree is actually critical for the job. Outside of fields like engineering and medical, they aren’t. I don’t care of the shift manager of a call center has a degree or not, it’s not going to impact the quality of work.
I still wanna know how someone could be dumb enough to get an absolutely useless sociology degree without any means of paying for it. My girlfriend has a friend from Ohio who goes to the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. I asked her how she plans on paying out-of-state tuition/R&B. She said “oh, I don’t know.” Are most young people this clueless?
Goes back to what I said above – child labor laws prevent on-the-job learning about working hard and how markets work. The government has been successful in creating young workers who have no idea how the world works, with child labor laws and forced public schooling. There are enough parents who are clueless about this, too, who are feeding bad information to their kids – just get that degree, everything will work out!
Everyone involved in subsidized schooling is clueless because the governmental subsidy has created an informational vacuum. There are no informational signals that would tell students when they are making the right economic decisions and when they are making the wrong ones. Getting $200K for a sociology degree deceives people into believing that a sociology degree is worth $200K. Just like a $400K loan for a house makes it look like the house is worth $400K.
Likewise, the university that actually receives all of this money (leaving the young people with the debt) doesn’t know which courses to teach, or how much to pay their professors, because the students are paying with inflated government money. If they had to make hard choices in the face of clear economic reality, a lot of colleges and curricula would disappear overnight. Clearly, most of what is offered today in college is glorified day care and mental masturbation.
Imagine a system where it was the university that took the loans, and thus bore all of the risk of seeing that their work product was economically valuable, rather than the students. It would be the school’s responsibility to then collect from their students, but if their graduates defaulted, then the school would be on the hook for the debt to the lenders. If this change didn’t eliminate student loans altogether, it would mean that universities would (a) become MUCH more selective, and (b) instantly know what things to teach that in order to provide their customers with the skills to be genuinely productive and thus earn money.
Could someone please direct me to a summary of the government manipulations of the education-loan industry?
You’ve got to be kidding.
$200,000 for sociology?
Really?
While certainly this girl is a fool for not realizing the danger in wasting four years of life acquiring over $200k in debt (the interest alone is insane on that), the more important thing to remember is this: 23 years old.
Any bank that wants to take the huge gamble on a 17 or 18 year old kid, and loans the money anyway, deserves whatever it gets – be it reward or failure. A kid that age typically has no credit, no serious work or life experience, and no way of knowing if their “career choice” is going to pay off to the tune of a $1600/mo payment. A bank taking that asinine risk deserves to write off the default and take its lumps.
The central problem that she and so many others have, is that whenever government gets involved in the guaranty business, the banks have no incentive whatsoever to act with intelligence, or to even consider consequence.
I believe that she’d be entirely justified in defaulting in a moral sense. She should not have taken out the loans, of course. And you obviously don’t need a degree to be successful or prosperous (in SOCIOLOGY! of all things – good lord!) But why didn’t the bank realize that she was too stupid and inexperienced to know better? A loan is always an investment and therefore a risk. Clearly, moral hazard is the real problem when the bank can’t possibly lose on its investments.
Unfortunately for her, we are in something like IRS territory here – due to the federal government as co-signer for the bank – she will never be relieved of that student loan debt. She cannot simply default or go into bankruptcy. They will garnish her wages. She will be sued-n-lien’d for any assets. She will never see a tax return for the next 30 years. She couldn’t get a loan if she begged for it. All at 23 years old. It will follow her for a long, long time if she can’t find a way into a large sum of money, and that isn’t looking promising either.
Thank you for pointing it out. This is quite a sad predicament for the girl.
There are people that carry student loans in their retirement. This is going to be more and more common.
Think about that one….
Student loans are dischargeable in certain very limited circumstances. One is that the loan causes “undue hardship.”
This is a high standard that can generally only be met if the student has made good faith efforts to make payments (which inevitably will be below the amount due, but thats ok), and then starts to face demonstrable financial difficulties in putting food on the table, taking care of a kid etc.
My advice to anyone in this predicament is, if you truly cannot pay the loans, don’t. When you get a job, if it can’t pay the full payment, pay some minimal amount that leaves you enough money to live humbly (food, shelter, clothes, small entertainment, etc). If a wage garnishment order is sued for, you can likely avoid it if you can demonstrate these things. Even if the order is given, it would be likely that it would require garnishments of the same amounts you are already paying.
Of course, this is all terrible and has a tendency to make you a debt slave. Work in a capacity in which you can take cash as much as possible.
What is clearly egregious here is that the bank is only paying 0.5% per year on this loan or $1000. The bank is making a huge markup on what is essentially a risk free loan.
Sometime back a wall street journal article spoke about the ills of generation to generation advice. In essence, the article concluded that we would probably fair better if we disregarded the advice of the prior generations. Or, advice is healthier from bottom up or between generations, not from top down (obviously there are some extremes here). I would think this should be kept mind when teachers babble about how hard life or college is as well as when they bully their advice upon their students (at least that would be my ‘advice’
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couldn’t happen to a better person
She’s destroyed. No future worth living for her. All she’s got left to do is get some likely lads to fill her up with dirty water, get preggers and have a bunch of fatherless kids. Then she can get lardy fat big obese like. Then all she needs is a trailer somewhere. That’s her life planned out. Thing is, that is pretty much as valuable as it was going to be anyhow.
Sione
You mean, like a sociology field study?
I bet that she goes into grad school.
Peter Schiff interviewed her last week and quickly showed her how she never would have been able to borrow so much money in the free market, and that the government is at fault for her situation. A great listen.
http://www.schiffradio.com
This girl is certainly not alone! Just think, her education is ranked 39th in the world, as it was acquired at sub-standard (by world standards) American schools and is recognized only in a sub-standard America, and then only as collateral on a guaranteed loan from American banksters! Where have all the Oldsmobiles gone, long time passing. Packards joined by Pontiacs, long time passing. Studebakers not seen now, long time passing. All re-engineered by Asians, today’s motoring reality! America is her own worst enemy, and rising gasoline prices combined with Asian economics are about to destroy her. Screwing students for gross profits is not nation building, not for America anyway.
The once great American Empire, now besmirched with the likes of a failing Detroit. the Rust Belt, failed manufacturing sector, and dope addiction on a world disrupting scale, turns on its own and screws them too! Will she go down in infamy, despised by her debtors, hated by her neighbors, fleeced by her protectorates, and drained of her soldiers? The military of America is and oil dependent utility, foreign oil! and her proletariat, her Patriots are being fleeced from within by the establishment for phony certificates not worth the paper they are printed on? When will the revolt happen? What will trigger it? Is it near? Will repuglican back-lash to Obama’s so-called socialism bring to the fore the mighty money men, and give them the opening to change even more legislation in their favor, thus strangling the last of the middle class? This girl has had her arse reamed but good by the money-men and has had her value as a useful, productive citizen doused in premature debt – and she studied hard for this privilege! Do the Universities have some responsibility? Most certainly! Most the pap they force the proletariat , the Patriots , to mesmerize is absolutely useless in the economy of this country and must be eliminated from curriculum! In short, they charge ridiculous sums to teach pure Bull Shiite to saps that don’t know any better, and with the blessing of the state? unAmerican, You bet your furry little brown spot it is!
hahaha. why would you ever waste the money and time going to college to major in sociology. she dug her own grave with that one.
How generous of the baby boomer generation to leave us with this legacy of debt. Hey x’ers and y’ers, I’ve got an idea: let’s borrow ourselves way beyond our worth until we can no longer repay and see what… Oh wait!
she couldn’t have gone to a public school and not dug herself so far into debt in the first place?
How nice of her to ask for donations just like that. I heard her story on the radio, and just listening to her mede me feel sorry for herself.
All these complaints about a sociology degree as if learning about your interests is sad or moronic.When your culture demands you enter university after spending twelve years learning a variety of useless subjects without once being asked what your true interests are or given a serious chance to consider your options (the vast majority of students have no idea what they want to do with their lives), let alone the many ways to practically apply what you’ve learned in either high school or university, why is this result so shameful? She made a stupid decision because she’s never had the chance to decide for her own future before. She learned about something she’s interested in after never having that opportunity.
Her naivety is not her fault.
(And don’t get me started on the pathways into careers that are played down, or not mentioned… or worse, the pathways that don’t exist, but look like they might)
It’s shameful and moronic because she went $200,000 into debt to do it. She could have gotten the same degree for MUCH less at another school, if all she wanted to do was learn about her interests. Or, hell, she didn’t need a degree to study what interested her. Yes, the education system failed her in never telling her this was a stupid thing to do, but that doesn’t stop it from being a stupid thing to do. At what point do we start expecting people to stop and think before they make a decision? At what point does she need to take responsibility for the fact that she could very easily have researched, found out what sort of job prospects there were, and then decided whether she could afford it? Frankly, I didn’t think the government would LET you borrow that much. And I KNOW most of the expensive schools have better programs for grants, scholarships, and work study. If all $200,000 of her schooling is in loans, she’s a MORON for not trying other avenues. I’m at one of the more expensive schools in my state, and my yearly cost is about $25,000. How the fuck long was she in school for? … ranting. She’s a moron. The situation sucks, but I have little sympathy.
Why the hell would you go to a school you know costs so much? Northwestern didn’t just hand you a bill at the end of your college career! You knew, before setting foot on campus for the first time, how much it would cost. And now you’re asking strangers to help pay for a mistake that you were committing every.day.for.four.years.
All of you are putting a degree in sociology down, but as a sociology major, I’m going to defend the case. A degree in sociology isn’t worthless or useless.. it’s people like all of you that do not understand the significance of the discipline. You learn many skills in sociology that are useful, but companies and other places of employment are so ignorant of these skills that sociology majors are just left out in the cold. I agree, she made a dumb decision.. Sociology works best when its doubled with another discipline like psychology, anthropology, or health science, and going to grad school with it. Getting a degree in Sociology and not going to grad school is a stupid idea.. But sociology makes a good preparation for any public service, health, etc. job. So don’t go putting the discipline down, because many of you probably have degrees others would call “useless”
I would think that the best test of whether your sociology degree was useful or valuable would be this: Does your degree give you the skills and techniques you need to convince a prospective employer that you are valuable? If not, does it give you the skills you need to create your own employment opportunities?
If, on average, sociology graduates are characterised as being unable to secure employment, I think the question is answered. I know you said sociology is a good training for “public service” and “public health” jobs, but that’s hardly a good sign, is it? If there is a concentration of sociology graduates in the public sector, this is more likely to be the result of misguided government policies than any inherent skillset in the sociology “profession”.
However, there is the possibility that it is personally valuable, e.g. it could make you feel good about yourself for having a degree, any degree. Values are subjective. But the point is that those of us who can see through the market distortions of government policies are not fooled into thinking that $200 000 is a good price for such a paltry feel-good. We feel sorry for her that she fell for this scam. Pity her sociology training in the first year didn’t give her the necessary skills to think critically about the choices she was making, huh?
who the fuck asks for, much less takes out, a $200k loan for a B.A?
the only thing i want to donate to this dumb whore is some common sense
Woah, let’s not jump to “whore” – first of all, it makes you sound rude and childish, and secondly, there is no evidence that she actually worked as a prostitute. In fact, if she had, that would have been a much more profitable use of her time than the B.A. in the first place.
Hey now, prostitution is a legitimate profession that’s unrightfully ostracized by government. Let’s not put it down.
Sorry, yes, that’s what I was trying to say. I have no beef with prostitution, but the word “whore” has negative associations, “prostitute” is more neutral.
Well, my issue is much more practical than that.
To begin with, I´m not an american and I don´t live in the US.
I studied sociology, then took a master´s and then took a PhD (in a related, somewhat more applied area, and in a foreign country). Fortunately, thanks to my parents’ support and to some scholarships and grants, I came out of it without a penny in debt.
Never been a big fan of government, but didn´t have anything against it either. Then just before I finished my PhD, I learned about Mises, and Hayek, and all the theories. I was hooked.
Now I´m back in my country, with a PhD, which is worthless here unless I go through a lenghty process of validation by a state university.
And… unemployed after 7 months. I find positions that I could apply for, but I got no experience, because I was studying. Unless I go look for work in a different area, but then… why did I waste all that time studying, and I would be making a lot less money.
So essentially, one of the few ways I can get a job is either through a contractor, or getting a government job.
Government pays well, most people around me will be proud of me if I get a gov. job… At my age, 31, getting another BA while unemployed is pretty much out of the question.
So, from a moral point of view – considering Ron Paul, Judge Napolitano, and a bunch of other people who claim to be libertarians and work or worked for the government – where do I stand?
I understand Ron Paul is elected to defend libertarian ideas, so he is not properly speaking a gov. employee in the sense that Napolitano was.
Anyone here who works for the government? And how do you deal with it?
Perhaps I’m missing some key point here, but I find it incredible that we’re suppose to have pity on this woman. Doesn’t anyone have the ability to step up and take responsibility for their own actions anymore? Why is the question, “Who would give $200K to a college student?” vs. “What college student would borrow $200K without the means of paying it back?”
Why on EARTH would she go into that amount of debt for 4-year degree? She’s the idiot that signed the loan documents. She was aware of what she was doing. “Let’s all have pity on her, because of the horrible situation that she was thrust into without her knowledge. Woe is her… Wall Street did this to her! The education system did this to her! The 1% did this to her!”
Lots of people have 4-year degrees that didn’t cost $200K. This is NOT the governments fault, this is not her parents’ fault, this isn’t my fault or your fault. She knowingly got herself into this situation, and now is looking for handouts. When will people stop feeling so entitled?
It occurs to me that she’s so far in debt because that “4 year” degree wasn’t– Northeastern’s website estimates yearly tuition and fees at about $51,000. She had to be in school about EIGHT years to get that much debt. Call it seven, if she took out extra to live on and such.
I love how everyone expects the loan officer to make some sort of decision in regards to the sensibleness of the loan. The student qualified and made the loan. Now she wants out?!
I did not get a college degree; however, I still make a good living as an IT manager. I made a decision to NOT create debt for myself that I was unsure if I could pay back. For me, it worked out. My path is not for everyone. I still have time to go get that degree if I want it and my company pays 100% if I do, but I just don’t see the purpose. It would be a worthless endeavor.
Occupy student loan offices.
“… you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a f***in education you coulda got for a dollah fifty in late chahges at the public library.” ~ Will Hunting
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119217/quotes
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