Giving easy credit to a college student is like giving a loaded gun to chimpanzee. You're right, this easy access financing has driven up costs.

Another problem is the social pressures placed on students to go to college. From grade school on their inculcated with the idea that they're lives will be in vain if they don't get a college degree. This pernicious conceit is responsible for creating thousands of useless "Communications" degrees, not to mention the "Ethnic studies" degrees. It's high time the U.S. began exalting trades again.

NPR did a great story last year on the dire need for watch repairmen.

I'm going to lock in my rates at 3.5, then get another point for paying through direct deposit.

I have to say, though, that I agree with Orrin. Every year that we were at Iowa State tuition went up by 10-13%. I am convinced that easy credit is a big reason. It takes a big tuition increase to get undergrads to give up the fun of campus life for living at home and going to community college.

I had a friend that was an extension finance expert at the University. He had all sorts of stories about kids who racked up 60-70,000 in student loans getting undergraduate degrees in English, then when they could only find work as waiters returned to school as English graduate students and took out more loans.

It seems that for all but certain fields of
study, higher education can be considered
as consumption rather than an investment.
There are not clear-cut entrance standards other
than ability to come up with the tuition.

It's just a middle-class status symbol like a
two car garage or nice electronics.

A friend of mine tells me that the average age
of licensed plumbers in N.H. is over 50 and that
a kid could go to trade school work a couple of
years as an apprentice and probably easily net
50K before he's 25, or he could go to college,
spend some time in grad school and hope to get
his act together by the time he's 35 or 40.

This relates to Orrin's middle-class welfare post,
since if you took away many of those perks, you'd
see the nature of the American labor market change
dramatically.

Jim

Just try to get a contractor, or even a handyman with good references. It's impossible.

Agree with all of the above comments on the economic inefficiencies associated with subsidizing "excess" college educations. And yet, none of the above, suggests the ultimate total costs of these subsidies, for a society which must them deal with the philosophical indoctrination (essentially, left-wing economics, anti-religious cultural values, and blame-America first multiculturalism) with which the "oner-educated" emerge from the hallowed halls of the libertal arts schools.

I haven't read the article, but the snippet does not mention that those of us who have already consolidated our student loans are out of luck -- no second consolidation is possible at these great rates. So, while some grads are getting those great rates, some of us are paying something like 8% or so. *shrug* Them's the breaks.

Putting myself through college (loans, work & non-full ride Army ROTC) the big epiphany happened before the end of the second year: certain classes required for a degree are purely a money gouge. My request to "challenge" a "Health 100" which was supposed to have been taken in the first year was denied. If I didn't take it, certain 300 level classes I really wanted were off the table.

I didn't by the book, showed up to maybe 30% of the classes, took the mid-term and final absolutely cold, completely fabricated the 12-page term paper on the 'positive effects of consistent exercise in adults 55+' (including all footnotes, references and bibliography) and wound up with a B-.

That worthless class cost me something every single month for a decade.