...specifically, the student loan crisis, the increasing cost of university and what, more and more, looks like some sort of ultimatum on the horizon. I bring this up for discussion because
starting today, government-subsidized student loan interest rates are set to double from 3.4% to 6.8%, because-surprise, surprise- Congress can't be assed to do something about it. (A spot of nuance: the previous 3.4% rates were actually low, not normal; the rates are simply returning to their usual levels). In the short term, this is undeniably bad for students. In the long term, it may be
good, because college costs have been rising in large part due to cheap federal money for university students.
In more dire terms, however, we could be looking at the next housing bubble. Currently, American students and ex-students owe nearly $1 trillion in loan debt, a number that has quadrupled in the last decade (
source). [For comparison, subprime mortgages were
worth $600 billion at their peak in the pre-2008 boom years.] That, in turn, affects their ability to make other big purchases like houses or cars, which are major drivers of the American economy. To cap that off, student loans are basically the only major sort of debt in the United States you can't declare bankruptcy on- you're stuck with them, permanently.
In short, it's a clusterfuck, and has potential to be the next housing bubble. The problem here isn't really that college graduates have crappy jobs out of college- this has been true of twenty-somethings for decades; otherwise they wouldn't be twenty-somethings. It's that they're chained to a huge amount of debt in the process that hurts their ability to get a house, marry, have kids, or otherwise move
out of twenty-something limbo. (And I have only so much sympathy for someone who takes out $50k of debt to get a degree in sociology or gender studies, these days. It was forgivable a decade ago when everybody was shouting at us to get on the college bandwagon, but post-2008, it's pretty clear you're going to be stuck empowering coffee beans for a good chunk of your days.) That being said, it's a technical problem, not a moral one, and one that we would be wise to fix now.
Then, too, there's the very dangerous insistence on "college for everyone". College is for
some of us, but hardly all, and American society's refusal to respect skilled blue-collar work, like the trades, doesn't just dehumanize good, salt-of-the-earth workers- it makes for bad policy. A common refrain I've heard in discussions on the subject is of someone who went to college, graduated with debt, and can't buy a house, while their class clown friends who derped around academically in high school learned a trade and make good money doing skilled manual labor. And then there's for-profit colleges. And a whole host of third-tier schools that have sprung up in the last thirty years or so to take in the flood of people who shouldn't necessarily be college students but became college students because That's What You Do. And the list goes on...
I'm taking out my first student loans in a few days. I got me some good scholarship money and I'm actively searching for more, so it's not that much, but it does make me mildly apprehensive...