The Lost Generation

“Most of today’s college grads won’t be able to retire until 73 due to high debt load —12 years later than the current average retirement age,” reports NerdWallet which produced the graphic. “Given a life expectancy of 84, grads will only have 11 years to enjoy retirement.”

Our Huge Stinking Pile

Of student loan debt …

Notice anything about this chart of student loan debt owed to the Federal government? Direct Federal loans to students have exploded higher, from $93 billion in 2007 to $560 billion in early 2013. This gargantuan sum exceeds the gross domestic product (GDP) of entire nations—for example, Sweden ($538 billion) and Iran ($521 billion). Non-Federal student loans total another $500 billion, bringing the total to over $1 trillion.

Does this look remotely sustainable? Does it look remotely healthy for students, society, taxpayers now on the hook for a half-trillion dollars in potential defaults or the U.S. economy?

Free money, not so free.

 

For some, college not worth the debt

Colleges for the most part teach useless stuff. things normal people will nevr use.

Glen Reynolds writes in his column:

With the hefty price tag on colleges only rising, prospective students should evaluate whether or not higher education is worth the student loan debt.

Is college for everyone? That’s pretty much the conventional wisdom today, but I don’t think so. And, in fact, for some people, it may be actively damaging. In deciding whether to take on debt– and give up years of their lives — in exchange for a college degree, applicants need to think more about potential downsides. And alternatives.

The message is to think about what you are paying for and how it will benefit you in the future … It’s a hamburger flipper part time economy out there. Not good what we have allowed to happen to our country.

I would say your search for an education start with the sciences, engineering, and then the rest form there. If you don’t have an engineering focus, then you might want to take a pass and just go for a career working at what you like.

COLLEGE IS WAY OVER SOLD FOR MOST PEOPLE…

CBO: Feds Siphoning Billions From Student Loan Program To Fund Obamacare

When you own the student loans, you can do anything with the money you want. So now Students are indirectly paying for Obamacare … with their college loans payments!!! How cool is that?

The Affordable Care Act is set to cost students enrolled in the government’s loan program $8.7 billion in extra interest over the next decade, according to a report published by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

According to a report from the CBO, Obamacare is costing students enrolled in the government’s loan program an extra $8.7 billion in interest.

If savings were kept inside the loan program, instead of transferred to Obamacare, as some Republican senators are suggesting, they could allow the Department of Education to lower student interest rates to 5.3 percent from 6.3 percent, according to the CBO.

New Grads Have Piled Up Debt That They Have no Way to Pay

Nears 1 Trillion total aggregate… Sure am glad Obama fixed the problem. The debt is all yours now!!! He spent your future…

Yeah it’s free tell me how that works out for you suckers. Who you gonna blame? You allowed him to bamboozle you didn’t you. The old teleprompter two step.

Nope just a tax and spend liberal.

70% of graduates had at least some debt according to the latest poll from Fidelity Investments but as the Wall Street Journal reports the average student-loan debt for a borrower who received a bachelor’s degree in 2013 is $30,000 – an all-time record. With $986 billion of outstanding student loan debt (up 50% from Q1 2009) and unemployment rates running at or near all-time highs for the 16-24 year old cohort in this nation, it is little surprise that delinquencies are surging. The unemployment rate among graduates is 7.1% (which is considerably worse than it looks given that many are stuck in low-paid jobs) but it is those who don’t complete college that face the greatest burden – the median annual income of a non-completer was $25,000 (compared to $33,900 for a degree holder), less than the average student loan debt. As the WSJ notes though, the 2013 class is unlikely to hold the ‘most indebted class ever’ title for long as 2014 enrollments and tuition costs look set to continue the 20 year trend…

What job? Better pisk your debt more carefully. I think “women studies degrees are losers. Among about half the coursework people take in college is worthless. Become an engineer, any engineer. Or just go get a job…

Unemployment among new grads is 53% when you talk about employed in your degree speciality.

More than half of America’s recent college graduates are either unemployed or working in a job that doesn’t require a bachelor’s degree, the Associated Press reported this weekend. The story would seem to be more evidence that, regardless of your education, the wake of the Great Recession has been a terrible time to be young and hunting for work.

Me I worked my way through college, and had no debt. It took me seven years to get my BSEE degree but so what. No debt.

Welcome to the latest Obama lie. Got you, didn’t he.

The Economy Flounders Along

March Consumer Credit Increase Driven Entirely (And Then Some) By Student And Car Loans

Just a slight miss, what would you call $15.6 billion expected $7.97 billion actual.

The March consumer credit headline was a disappointment, increasing by just $7.97 billion, on expectations of a $15.6 billion increase, with the February total revised lower to $18.14 billion. So far so bad. It gets worse when one peeks beneath the surface and finds that discretionary consumer credit in the form of credit card and other revolving loans posted its first decline of 2013, dropping by $1.7 billion, the biggest decline since December’s 2.1 billion.

So what rose: why debt for purchases of Government Motors and student loans of course, which increased by $9.676 billion in March. In other words: the student bubble keeps getting bigger, more and more GM cars are being bought on subprime credit, while the vast majority of Americans can’t even afford to charge toilet paper purchases as the discretionary deleveraging continues.

Sub prime car loans Special Report: How the Fed fueled an explosion in subprime auto loans

No real borrowing just rowing in air. Consumers are in their shelters.

Mounting Student Loans a ‘Debt Bomb’ Waiting to Explode

Low information Obama voters take note … It’s your future Obummer is destroying.

It’s a vicious cycle. Many families in this country cannot afford the skyrocketing cost of higher education without student loans. But many graduates cannot find a job and cannot pay off the loans. As a result, they wind up in a much deeper hole (as the interest and collection fees accrue) with no way out.

Student loan debt in the U.S. now totals more than $1 trillion. That’s more than all the outstanding credit card debt in the country.

A recent report by the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys found that both students and parents are borrowing at record rates.

College seniors who graduated with student loans in 2010 owed an average of $25,250, up five percent from the previous year. Parents had an average of $34,000 in student loans for their children. The report says the number of these parental loans has jumped 75 percent since 2005-2006.

“These are enormous numbers,” says Ike Shulman, a bankruptcy attorney in San Jose, Calif.  “They’re basically setting us up for having a large number of fellow citizens become economically non-functional for the rest of their adult lives.” 

Excerpt NBCNews

POP Goes Another Obama Bright Idea: Student Loan Bubble Update: “This Situation Is Simply Unsustainable”

Zero Hedge writes:

The last time we looked at the most under reported debt crisis sweeping the land, which is nothing short of the second coming of subprime, namely the student loan bubble, we posted “the scariest chart of the quarter” in which the Fed had finally caught up with our prior data showing that student loan delinquency had soared to some 11% from the 9% reported in the previous quarter, even as the Fed disclosed it had issued some $42 billion in Federal student loans in the same quarter, and a cumulative $956 billion, a number which as of December 31 is certainly over $1 trillion. This number was lower than the one we had shown previously, or a default rate of some 13.4%, sourced by the DOE. As it turns out both we and the Fed were optimistic.

According to just released data from Fair Issac:

Research by FICO Labs into the growing student lending crisis in the U.S. has found that, as a group, individuals taking out student loans today pose a significantly greater risk of default than those who took out student loans just a few years ago. The situation is compounded by significant growth in the amount of debt that new graduates are carrying.

The delinquency rate today on student loans that were originated from 2005-2007 is 12.4 percent. The comparable figure for student loans that were originated from 2010-2012 is 15.1 percent, representing an increase in the delinquency rate by nearly 22 percent

And since there is always a lag between getting the full cohort remittance and delinquency data, the real bad loan percentage is likely in the 20%+ category. So $1 trillion in federal student debt now, 20% delinquency, means $200 billion in loan defaults with zero collateral. And rising fast.

What’s the unemployment rate among new grads? Could it be our contracting economy is the problem, Obama?

Bubble Popping: Student Loan Delinquency Rates Spiking

Comparisons between the inflated student loan market and the housing bubble circa 2008 are apt. Both have resulted from heavy government intervention in the lending markets to promote, in the case of mortgages, home ownership and, in the case of student loans, college education.

The housing bubble popped, shoving us into a national economic malaise from which we’ve yet to recover. The student loan bubble hasn’t yet popped, but we seem to be getting closer.

Via Zero Hedge, 90 day delinquency rates for higher education are spiking:

Did You Think The Tooth Fairy Would Pay For It?

The meaning of Julia and debt slavery …

I went to college, I went to a school I could afford, with low tuition and costs that I could pay as you go. And believe me it was a hard long road, to get it all done.

But after 8 years, I graduated with no debt, no bills, and Jimmy Carter’s economy starring me in the face. But we had no college bills to pay.

Apparently students today don’t seem to get it …

The New York Times has an article on Student Loans … And the stupidity of that debt spiral. The video they post “Graduating Into Debt” says it all. It’s not worth it …

Lets face it, big education needs to take a hit like the housing market did, flatter than that even. Luring students into taking courses in useless endeavors and college degrees should be a crime. Flatter than an ice cream cone on a summer sidewalk.

It’s informative, especially the video.

My degree was in electrical engineering. I studied computers and software design, engineering wasn’t as sub-divided into boutique fields when I went. It was just electrical engineering, period. And I knew who was paying, me and my wife were doing the heavy lifting. If I couldn’t afford tuition for a semester, it waited while I worked some more. That’s how I did it, and so should you.