Great article. Personally, this is a sensitive issue for me. I am the first person in my family (nuclear or extended) to go to university. When I was growing up I didn't even know university was opportunity for me. It was very difficult to learn about the structure of university and understand what program would enable me to excel in a future career that would make me happy, because there was no one within my family to help guide me. Either way, I feel lucky to have grown up in Canada because my hard work allowed me to get into (and afford) one of the best universities in the world. I excelled and right now I am in graduate school with little debt and applying to do a PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology. Sometimes I wonder if I would have been able to do this if I had grown up in America. I know there are some universities that are affordable but many of the best universities are so expensive that people in the lower-middle class really have no hope of attending them without accumulating enormous debt.
It depends on what you want to go to college for. If you want to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or something along those lines then good luck getting through without a lot of debt. A cousin of mine from a firmly entrenched middle class family went to medical school and is now in about 175k of debt. I'm in college for engineering and am in about 40k of debt with another 2 years out a five year program. It's a system that really needs to be reworked, or you're looking at a good portion of a generation entering the working world with massive amounts of debt.
The education debt will be the new economic bubble that bursts. With more and more students take out loans they cant pay back to expensive universities (not to mention for-profit colleges) that they might not graduate from. What also is frightening is there seems to be no way to escape the debt (It stays through bankruptcy). College in America seems to trapped in the past where only the wealthy could take the chance on their children getting a degree, finding a job within that field that pays well enough. What sucks is a massive overhaul of the higher educational system, if that is possible at all at this point, would cause chaos and divide those who paid and those who didn't pay.
I think this is a good article, and I do agree there is a wealth gap at play here, but I think that there are bigger problems surrounding college debt and how we go about receiving training or requiring training for jobs. A big part of the reason that students are unable to pay of their debt after college is that they can't find a good job in their field of study. There was a time when you could drop out of high school, get a job, and hold that job and earn a decent living to feed your family. Younger kids could apprentice with mechanics, carpenters, contractors, etc. and learn a trade that they could use. While there are still some opportunities in the US for young people to do this, these jobs do not provide the same sort of lifestyle they once did. While I think that college education is a good thing, I also think that it has become very idealized, like if you go to college you will automatically have a better life. My little sister hated school, didn't want to go to college, so she went to a trade school, trained to be a dental assistant, and now she works in the office of an oral/facial surgeon, makes a pretty decent living combined with her husband's wage from the grocery store where he works, and without going to college, or even incurring a large debt. So basically, I think that college is a good thing, and I think that anybody who really wants to go to college should have the opportunity, however, I think that the US needs to rid itself of the stigma that has developed around jobs that do not require a college degree, and trade schools should be utilized more than they are. They can even help a kid get certified for a great job they can hold while going to school.
I tend to think that college degrees are good if you go into it thinking this is to make me a better informed more knowledgeable person. This is to teach me how to learn, how to approach problems. If it's all about a job, then perhaps you're missing the point. It's about acquiring a career path, then undergrad is really only the first step for most people.
I think this is a fair assessment. I would say that any post-high school training could be approached this way, and that is what I wish more people were open to. I think society needs to rid itself of the "Oh, you're a trucker? You must have been too dumb for college." type of stigma. My father-in-law had a master's degree in electrical engineering and held contracts with NASA for his optical systems, but he went out and got a CDL and drove trucks for a while because he had always wanted to. I often wonder what people in gas stations thought of him when he was on a trips, no way did they know that he was an expert in holography, or lidar, or that he had developed the optical disk used in IBM's first barcode scanner. Einstein was a patent clerk, kind of unassuming.
Great comment. This is something that I have to remind myself, I don't really know anybody and I shouldn't assume to. Almost everyone that I have taken the time to really know has something that makes them unique, a gift or a passion for something that is theirs alone. It doesn't matter if they're a truck driver, a patent clerk, or a dishwasher… Most of us are striving toward something and that striving is what's remarkable.