'Ripping Off Young America: The College-Loan Scandal'

[Popular Front of Judea]

This slow motion train wreck should be a serious opportunity for radical organizing. Debt moratorium anyone?

There's a particularly dark twist to the education story, which is tied to the collapse of the middle class and the overall shittening of our economic landscape: College degrees are actually considered to be more essential than ever. The New York Times did a story earlier this year declaring the college degree to be the "new high school diploma," describing it as essentially a minimum job requirement. They found an Atlanta law firm that requires even clerks, secretaries and runners to have four-year degrees and cited research that everyone from hygienists to cargo agents needs to have graduated from college to get hired.

You can look at this development in one of two ways. One way is to see a college degree as a better investment than ever, which was the conclusion of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which noted that the difference in earnings between the poorly and well-educated has risen in recent years with the worsening economy.

But another way to look at this new truth is that, because of the poor job market, young people may have less of a chance than ever to actually get a good job commensurate with their education. If they don't have the degree, then they have no chance at all. So if they even want a clerking job, they must dive face-first into the debt muck and take their chances that they won't end up watching the federal government take bites out of disability checks while their law degree gathers dust downstairs somewhere. So, yes, a college education is a great thing, and you probably need one now more than ever – the problem is that it may very well be mandatory, may have less of a chance of ever getting you a job, and you may still be paying for it on your deathbed no matter what.

Ripping Off Young America: The College-Loan Scandal | Rolling Stone (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ripping-off-young-america-the-college-loan-scandal-20130815?print=true)

[Achronos]

And furthering the diminishing valuation of the Bachelor's Degree to being absolutely worthless.

It is this sort of ideology that allows diploma farms to crop up and make a ton of money with providing very little education. They can take the money and run and not be held accountable for the actual education they provide. EDIT: Let me make clear that if you require a degree for any job, you will have institutions who will take advantage of this and churn out diplomas like if they were a factory assembly line (and isn't this true to some degree now?). So these colleges very much like this idea of having basic entry level jobs requiring degrees because it nets them more $$$.

Most jobs do not need a bachelor's degree as a requirement, but since the corporations have the privilege of a larger unemployed class to select from they can dictate ridiculous standards for petty positions...and still get you to work $9/hr.

There is no guarantee a bachelor's degree is going to get you a great paying job, let alone one to pay down the exorbitant loans.

I like the German model when it comes to schooling. For me I would shutdown about ~80% of schools, replace them with vocational ones and the rest of the 20% be for those who want to be academics.

If you can't get a scholarship/grant/tuition reimbursement then it isn't worth piling on the debt for school.

Many jobs are going to continue to evaporate as we have fully transitioned into a rent economy while the unemployment class will continue to grow. We will all be making and filing patents soon enough...

[Kingfish]

Many jobs are going to continue to evaporate as we have fully transitioned into a rent economy while the unemployment class will continue to grow. We will all be making and filing patents soon enough...

Would you be so kind as to expand/futher explain on what you mean by rent economy and the bolded part of your post?

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I like aspects the German pre-university education model too - put vocational schools and academic schools on a separate but equal footing, so that vocations aren't something that people do only if they 'fail' at being academic, but something they can choose earlier on in their teen years.

As for college debt, this is something that has crept slowly but definitely into the UK system over the past decade or so, to the point where an undergraduate degree is also seen as a sort of 'minimum' requirement for many jobs.

Expanding the availability, quality and prestige of vocational education would be a way to avoid this debt explosion of the future, but of course it's not really in the interests of capital to do that since the skills associated with vocational training are often just not in demand by profit-making blocs of capital, in terms of their labour force requirements.