I find the willingness of students to go into massive debt to finance college and university living to be puzzling and astounding. Why accumulate debts of up to $100K or more to attend a college or university only to study topics that have little-to-no marketable value? Do these students have no idea what they are doing?
Perhaps more articles like this opinion piece in the NYTimes, despite its whiny self-centered tone, will help more students and parents make better-informed decisions in the future. I read most of the comments there and fully agreed with the ones that took the writer to task for everything said in the piece.
By the end of my sophomore year at a small private liberal arts college, my mother and I had taken out a second loan, my father had declared bankruptcy and my parents had divorced. My mother could no longer afford the tuition that the student loans weren’t covering. I transferred to a state college in New Jersey, closer to home.
Years later, I found myself confronted with a choice that too many people have had to and will have to face. I could give up what had become my vocation (in my case, being a writer) and take a job that I didn’t want in order to repay the huge debt I had accumulated in college and graduate school. Or I could take what I had been led to believe was both the morally and legally reprehensible step of defaulting on my student loans, which was the only way I could survive without wasting my life in a job that had nothing to do with my particular usefulness to society.
I chose life. That is to say, I defaulted on my student loans.
The writer is Lee Siegel, a successful journalist/author. If it's the same Lee Siegel as in the Wikipaedia link, he can afford to repay the loans. He sounds more like a creep than an exploited student. For example, from Wikipaedia,
In September 2006, Siegel was suspended from The New Republic, after an internal investigation determined he was participating in misleading comments in the magazine's "Talkback" section, in response to criticisms of his blog postings at The New Republic's website and vicious attacks on his character.[5] The comments were made through the device of a "sock puppet" dubbed "sprezzatura", who, as one reader noted, was a consistently vigorous defender of Siegel, and who specifically denied being Siegel when challenged by another commenter in "Talkback". In response to readers who had criticized Siegel's negative comments about TV talk show host Jon Stewart, 'sprezzatura' wrote, "Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep".[6] The New Republic posted an apology and shut down Siegel's blog. In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Siegel dismissed the incident as a "prank".
So this guy is basically a schmuck who is trying to use the plight of students today to justify not repaying his student loans from 30 years ago?
Read the comments on his piece. They are mostly devastating.
As I said, I hope young high school students today will learn from him. But I hope they will learn to look ahead and carefully assess their decisions about higher education, course majors, and student loans. I hope they will not take this piece as a justification for borrowing big and not repaying the loans.