The Lasting Consequences of Student Debt
The thing that irks me about this the most is how it&#x27;s the people who were doing exactly what they were told that got hurt the most. The good kids who went to the best school they could get in to, studied whatever they were interested in, and if that thing happened to be literature or women&#x27;s studies or a wide number of other things you might just spend the next 20 years figuring out how to live with debt you can&#x27;t pay off.<p>I was brought up under the faulty assumption that if you graduate from college you get a promising career, so pay whatever that takes. Full stop. My entire generation was. Not one teacher or counselor or advisor ever mentioned anything about cost relative to career prospects, and now it&#x27;s my smart friends who are getting kicked in the teeth, while the kids like me who didn&#x27;t listen and dropped out and played with computers are richly rewarded.<p>I can&#x27;t even count the number of friends with six figures of student debt and no career on both hands.<p>I think Peter Thiel was right: for some time Americans believed in a college education so fully, so completely that we ignored the cost, even as it skyrocketed. Couple that with federally-backed loans, and no one even considered the <i>risk</i>. 100% of the risk was put on 18-year-old kids, many of whom had never seen a day in the workforce, paid a bill, or had a job.<p>A lot of people will make it out unscathed, but for those that don&#x27;t we lived through (or are living in) a giant secondary education bubble. But this time it&#x27;s one that you can&#x27;t bankrupt your way out of.