Free College Does Not Equal Debt Free
Free College Does Not Equal Debt Free
I never paid for college but completed college with $90,000 in student loan debt. How did that happen? In short I had to borrow $10,000 a year in student loans for nine years for the cost of living. The long version comes next.
In 1980 I graduated from high school in Indiana with a "full boat" to a State school, Purdue University. The year 1980 was also the year my parents divorced and my emotional world was upended.
I only attended one semester at Purdue. In part due to the shock when I learned from my student financial advisor that I was going to be $40,000 in debt when I graduated in 1984 even with the full boat. You see even though tuition was free then one still had to pay for student housing, books, and other living expenses. In 1980 my Dad earned $18,000 and I was making minimum wage working retail full-time. The $40,000 seemed like an infinite amount of money to me so I dropped out.
The $40,000 wasn't the deciding factor though, just the last straw. My parents getting divorced uprooted my world view at the age of seventeen and I was living with my brother, working to pay rent and supporting myself. Going to college further pulled the rug out from under me emotionally and I realized this was all to much for me to emotionally deal with, so I dropped out. However, I did not let the $40,000 figure completely scare me and I dedicated myself to going back to college in ten years after I was emotionally better grounded.
And I did.
In 1988 community college in the State of California was tuition free. One still had to buy textbooks, parking permits, and other school stuff. Text books alone ran me $400-$1,000/year by the time I graduated. Someone should ask Bernie Sanders if text books are going to be included. The $1,000 per year is loan worthy itself.
When I started college in 1988 I roughly estimated I'd be at least $100,000 in debt from student loans. My final total was $90,000, or roughly I borrowed $10,000/year to pay for living expenses.
Like I said, community college in 1988 in California was tuition free. I was not debt free even though I was working. I did my two years of university work as four years of community college while working full-time. I was borrowing money using credit cards even then to make ends meet. Like so many Americans I was using credit cards to pay for living expenses. By the time I got to UC Berkeley I was $20,000 in debt to credit cards. By the time I graduated in 1998 I was $50,000 in debt in credit cards. Full-time work at UC Berkeley does not allow one to work full-time so I had to drop to part-time and borrow $15,000/year in student loans to live. The credit-card debt and student loan debt were both necessary.
My college at UC Berkeley was free. How? Scholarship. Turns out in 1993 when I started at UC Berkeley there was a scholarship program in place that as long as one makes the Dean's list of having a 3.5 GPA or better than the college of Engineering guaranteed any engineering student a full scholarship. I paid no tuition as an undergraduate on the Dean's list. Graduate school was also tuition free. Graduate school was free because graduate research work paid tuition. I never paid tuition going to college in America.
However, college was not free.
Some fifty-percent of children in the United States live in singe-parent homes. Homes with no basements. Their college financial situation better reflects my experience then millennials living in their parent's home. Homes where the single-mother works two jobs just for the smallest of accommodations. This notion that all millennials living in their parent's basement while in their twenty's is fiction for single parents. Single parents don't own homes, they rent, and what they rent doesn't have a basement.
What this means is that going to college means borrowing money to pay the rent, to pay living expenses. Community colleges don't have on-campus housing. The perverse notion of community college as free college is that in states like California paying the rent off campus every year can easily exceed a $30,000/year tuition fee of a full university that includes on campus living.
Now lets talk credit cards. The credit card industry preys on students. The certainly preyed upon me. What do I mean by that. The credit card companies know that while a student you're 100% likely to be late on payments at times because you are not working. Duh. Credit card companies will jack up interest rates to 30% on just one past 30 day payment. By the time I had graduated from college I had over fifty past 30 day payments and around a dozen past 90 day payments wracked up on my credit cards. I eventually paid them all off over a decade. While the credit card companies will hit you with 30% interest rates on a single past 30 payment it can then take years for your interest rate to go down. During that time the credit card company is getting fat preying on students by having them pay 30% interest for years. That's how they prey.
One cannot fix the college debt problem without fixing the the predatory credit card problem. Did I need credit cards to finishing school? Sure. Did credit card companies need to charge me 30% interest for over a decade? Not even close. Credit card companies are just evil.
Free college as defined by free tuition that Bernie Sanders is campaigning on is disingenuous. I had free tuition for nine years of college, I never paid for college. I still ended up with over $90,000 in student loans and $50,000 in credit card debt charging 30% interest due to not working in college.
My parents never had money to send their kids to college. Single parents that make up 50% of households don't either. Millions of students are faced with working to pay for the cost of living while going to school. Millions of Americans facing large student loan debts are also facing large credit card debts with outrageous interest rates due to late payments.
America's college financial problem is much larger than tuition, especially in States like California where the cost of living requires $20-30,000/year just for rent. Especially when half of households for decades now are single parent renting with no basement for children to live in.
Free tuition does not equal free college. America is going to have to rethink college housing at a minimum. Further credit card predatory practices need to be stopped. Finally we are going to have to admit publicly that single parent families that will never be able to afford college for their kids is a norm and we need to reject portrayals of these pipe-dream nuclear families by Hollywood, media, and religion. We need to admit our reality about family in 2020 and change things accordingly. Free tuition does not mean no student loans in 2020 for students who cannot live at home.
I bring this topic up because managing community is different in Irreni World Scale. Irreni World Scale takes a different approach to community problems such as college education. Irenni World Scale uses MGOs to manage life's periods of uneven cashflow where an MGO is a group of size 30 people sharing resources. Join an MGO today because in a capitalist society there is no such thing as a free lunch, or free college.
Cheers!
Benefit of cooperation replaces rule of law!
Freethinkers unite!
Freedom!
Party On!
Let's get cracking!
Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!
Politics as Science!
Demand Irreni World Scale!
Anti-theism is feminism!
Think disruption!
Empathy for all!
Moral relativity: think it, breath it!
Prove it or lose it!
Conversations equal consensus!
Welcome to the 21st century!
Scale your empathy, scale the world!
Find your tribe!
Be sexy people!
The future is coming!
Innovate at a rapid pace!
Slow speed ahead!
Well come! and well met!
I never paid for college but completed college with $90,000 in student loan debt. How did that happen? In short I had to borrow $10,000 a year in student loans for nine years for the cost of living. The long version comes next.
In 1980 I graduated from high school in Indiana with a "full boat" to a State school, Purdue University. The year 1980 was also the year my parents divorced and my emotional world was upended.
I only attended one semester at Purdue. In part due to the shock when I learned from my student financial advisor that I was going to be $40,000 in debt when I graduated in 1984 even with the full boat. You see even though tuition was free then one still had to pay for student housing, books, and other living expenses. In 1980 my Dad earned $18,000 and I was making minimum wage working retail full-time. The $40,000 seemed like an infinite amount of money to me so I dropped out.
The $40,000 wasn't the deciding factor though, just the last straw. My parents getting divorced uprooted my world view at the age of seventeen and I was living with my brother, working to pay rent and supporting myself. Going to college further pulled the rug out from under me emotionally and I realized this was all to much for me to emotionally deal with, so I dropped out. However, I did not let the $40,000 figure completely scare me and I dedicated myself to going back to college in ten years after I was emotionally better grounded.
And I did.
In 1988 community college in the State of California was tuition free. One still had to buy textbooks, parking permits, and other school stuff. Text books alone ran me $400-$1,000/year by the time I graduated. Someone should ask Bernie Sanders if text books are going to be included. The $1,000 per year is loan worthy itself.
When I started college in 1988 I roughly estimated I'd be at least $100,000 in debt from student loans. My final total was $90,000, or roughly I borrowed $10,000/year to pay for living expenses.
Like I said, community college in 1988 in California was tuition free. I was not debt free even though I was working. I did my two years of university work as four years of community college while working full-time. I was borrowing money using credit cards even then to make ends meet. Like so many Americans I was using credit cards to pay for living expenses. By the time I got to UC Berkeley I was $20,000 in debt to credit cards. By the time I graduated in 1998 I was $50,000 in debt in credit cards. Full-time work at UC Berkeley does not allow one to work full-time so I had to drop to part-time and borrow $15,000/year in student loans to live. The credit-card debt and student loan debt were both necessary.
My college at UC Berkeley was free. How? Scholarship. Turns out in 1993 when I started at UC Berkeley there was a scholarship program in place that as long as one makes the Dean's list of having a 3.5 GPA or better than the college of Engineering guaranteed any engineering student a full scholarship. I paid no tuition as an undergraduate on the Dean's list. Graduate school was also tuition free. Graduate school was free because graduate research work paid tuition. I never paid tuition going to college in America.
However, college was not free.
Some fifty-percent of children in the United States live in singe-parent homes. Homes with no basements. Their college financial situation better reflects my experience then millennials living in their parent's home. Homes where the single-mother works two jobs just for the smallest of accommodations. This notion that all millennials living in their parent's basement while in their twenty's is fiction for single parents. Single parents don't own homes, they rent, and what they rent doesn't have a basement.
What this means is that going to college means borrowing money to pay the rent, to pay living expenses. Community colleges don't have on-campus housing. The perverse notion of community college as free college is that in states like California paying the rent off campus every year can easily exceed a $30,000/year tuition fee of a full university that includes on campus living.
Now lets talk credit cards. The credit card industry preys on students. The certainly preyed upon me. What do I mean by that. The credit card companies know that while a student you're 100% likely to be late on payments at times because you are not working. Duh. Credit card companies will jack up interest rates to 30% on just one past 30 day payment. By the time I had graduated from college I had over fifty past 30 day payments and around a dozen past 90 day payments wracked up on my credit cards. I eventually paid them all off over a decade. While the credit card companies will hit you with 30% interest rates on a single past 30 payment it can then take years for your interest rate to go down. During that time the credit card company is getting fat preying on students by having them pay 30% interest for years. That's how they prey.
One cannot fix the college debt problem without fixing the the predatory credit card problem. Did I need credit cards to finishing school? Sure. Did credit card companies need to charge me 30% interest for over a decade? Not even close. Credit card companies are just evil.
Free college as defined by free tuition that Bernie Sanders is campaigning on is disingenuous. I had free tuition for nine years of college, I never paid for college. I still ended up with over $90,000 in student loans and $50,000 in credit card debt charging 30% interest due to not working in college.
My parents never had money to send their kids to college. Single parents that make up 50% of households don't either. Millions of students are faced with working to pay for the cost of living while going to school. Millions of Americans facing large student loan debts are also facing large credit card debts with outrageous interest rates due to late payments.
America's college financial problem is much larger than tuition, especially in States like California where the cost of living requires $20-30,000/year just for rent. Especially when half of households for decades now are single parent renting with no basement for children to live in.
Free tuition does not equal free college. America is going to have to rethink college housing at a minimum. Further credit card predatory practices need to be stopped. Finally we are going to have to admit publicly that single parent families that will never be able to afford college for their kids is a norm and we need to reject portrayals of these pipe-dream nuclear families by Hollywood, media, and religion. We need to admit our reality about family in 2020 and change things accordingly. Free tuition does not mean no student loans in 2020 for students who cannot live at home.
I bring this topic up because managing community is different in Irreni World Scale. Irreni World Scale takes a different approach to community problems such as college education. Irenni World Scale uses MGOs to manage life's periods of uneven cashflow where an MGO is a group of size 30 people sharing resources. Join an MGO today because in a capitalist society there is no such thing as a free lunch, or free college.
Cheers!
Benefit of cooperation replaces rule of law!
Freethinkers unite!
Freedom!
Party On!
Let's get cracking!
Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!
Politics as Science!
Demand Irreni World Scale!
Anti-theism is feminism!
Think disruption!
Empathy for all!
Moral relativity: think it, breath it!
Prove it or lose it!
Conversations equal consensus!
Welcome to the 21st century!
Scale your empathy, scale the world!
Find your tribe!
Be sexy people!
The future is coming!
Innovate at a rapid pace!
Slow speed ahead!
Well come! and well met!
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