Sunday, April 13, 2014
Saturday, April 12, 2014
The cost of education, and how it affects your future
Important topic, so here's a summary for those not interested in reading on…
"You might have a passion for philosophy or dream of being an investigative journalist. But computer science or public relations are more likely to pay the bills, so you change your major—indeed, your whole life—accordingly.
Is that selling out or just trying to survive?
For young people education has become as commercialized as anything else in modern life. Over the course of a single generation, education has been transformed from a relatively affordable public good into a social necessity priced as though it were a luxury item.
In 2013, the average student was almost $30,000 in the hole after graduation. Total student debt has nearly quadrupled in the last decade alone and recently surpassed $1 trillion in total, most of it held by individuals from low-income families. Combine these facts with dreadful employment options and stagnating wages, and it’s no wonder 20 percent of borrowers will be delinquent within their first five years of paybacks.
The rising price of education changes us at an existential level, forcing young people and their parents to apply a cost-benefit analysis to learning. The prospect of a lifetime of student loan remittances will turn anyone into homo economicus looking for a return on investment.
Some will ignore these changing conditions, preferring instead to wag their fingers and lament that “millennials” just don’t care about the state of society… Too often conversations about selling out devolve into inquests focused on personal purity when it’s the larger, screwed-up economic system that we should be putting on trial—not individual choices. Selling out still matters, but only because more and more people are being forced to do it."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)