Educational grants are down. The federal government has been slashed spending for higher education. There are more students who need money for school, and proportionally less money to go around. Schools give credit card companies access to their students, and the companies bank on the fact that students may be uninformed about consumer debt.
Who’s to blame? The students, apparently, for being selfish narcissists.
But the problem isn’t just financial pitfalls. It’s also a need for instant gratification. Since birth, Generation Me has been spoon-fed self-esteem and told they could be whoever they wanted to be, says Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University psychology professor and author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before. She adds that they don’t want to earn it — they expect it to be handed to them. A 2002 survey conducted by Twenge and professors at the University of Georgia found that young people mostly agreed with the traditionally narcissistic statements “I am a special person” and “I can live my life any way I want to.” The self-esteem that’s seemingly made young people more confident and ambitious has crossed over into entitlement, and caused them to have unrealistic expectations — which they often fulfill through debt.
Right.
Now perhaps I’m being a little sensitive because I will also be graduating hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. So will most people I know in law school. But it isn’t because we’re selfish, entitled little shits. We’re working our asses off. We wish our school was more affordable. We’re trying to live in New York City, pay rent, and survive on less than $19,000 a year with little or no other income. We watch our Sallie Mae accounts mounting. We groan when NYU raises tuition 7-8 percent every year, which, in real dollars, is in the thousands. I don’t have credit cards. I can’t spend money I don’t have. And loans are fixed — you can’t take out an unlimited amount just because you want to, contrary to what the author here infers. If I could take out more, I would, because as it stands I’m living on a shoe string. But I’m not living in a tiny six-floor-walk-up apartment and eating pasta every day and trying to do some tutoring in my spare time because I’m special and I deserve it.
Are there some students I’ve met who are entitled twits? You bet. NYU undergrad was full of ‘em. But law school is generally a different story, and I’d be willing to bet that there are plenty of unentitled, debt-ridden undergraduates out there who are struggling to get through school and crossing their fingers that they’ll find gainful employment afterwards.
Are there some students who make really poor decisions and become overwhelmed with credit card debt? Sure. But to paint us all with the same broad brush, and to infer that having substantial educational debt is irresponsible and narcissistic is simply ridiculous. I would love it if I had grants instead of loans, or if my tuituion was in the thousands instead of the tens of thousands. But that’s not how higher education funding works these days. And I can understand the temptation of credit cards, especially when student loans are not exactly generous when it comes to living expenses.
The fact is, for a lot of people, it is worth it to go into debt for school. Expensive graduate schools like NYU Law may put you in debt, but they also virtually guarantee you a well-paying job afterwards; NYU also has a loan forgiveness program if you go into public interest work. Those are things that I evaluated before deciding to go there.
Further, the kind of debt that I’m in — and that many other students are in — can be so overwhelming that it’s beyond comprehension. So when Mikey, one of the subjects of this article, makes comments like, “I’m going to be a lawyer when I grow up… Lawyer Michael 10 years from now is going to say that this was worth it,” it sounds a little ridiculous, but I think it’s more a reflection of the day to day reality that we live. When you know you owe Sallie Mae $200,000, it’s not so scary to owe American Express $450. Just another drop in the pot. Is it dumb to go on shopping sprees and have thousands of dollars of credit card debt when you’re also hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt from student loans and really can’t afford it? Absolutely. But I’d say that’s the exception, not the rule.
But aside from all that, it’s a cheap angle to attack students, most of whom have worked very hard to get where they are, and many of whom are certainly not nonchalant about their mounting debt. Higher education funding is a public policy issue, not just an issue of individual responsibility. And laying this all at our feet — and accusing us of narcissism for paying for our education in the only accessible way — is, to put it simply, crap.
The author would have better spent her time examining the system that limits educational funding opportunities to loans, and which cuts low-cost government loans. She might have been better off looking at the deep financial hit that the middle class in this country has taken, leaving recent college graduates, especially in rural areas, unemployed or under-employed, and therefore unable to pay off the cost of their education. Instead, she argues that they were selfish for going to school and taking out those loans in the first place.
Full disclosure: I went to undergrad with Mikey, the subject of this article (thanks for sending it on, Mike). He is not, in fact, a complete asshole, despite how this article frames him.
That’s really one hell of a double bind Prof. Twenge is putting to students who aren’t getting their education paid by the traditional means (having rich parents), or by *cough* generous governmental free education all the way to university level, with even a small student grant (which is monitored to ensure progress).
If one takes loan to finance better prospects in life, to get a good job, one is lazy and selfish, but if one doesn’t get a loan to finance studies and instead remains content in McJobs, well, I suppose that too makes one lazy and selfish.
I’m sick of the bashing of our generation too. Two of my least favorite social commentary cliches — “college students treat education as a consumer product” and “high school students are overscheduled and obsessed with their resumes” — are more seductive versions of this kind of thinking. The high school one is more about portraying young people as victims, the college one about them as perpetrators, but the underlying idea is the same: that there’s something wrong with a culture that encourages people to think of themselves as individuals, whether it’s by prizing intellectual pursuits over the parties and football games that teenagers are supposed to prefer, or by questioning their professors.
The irony on my face during the interview was hard to translate into words, I presume.
Hear, hear.
Boys and girls, it’s time for a history lesson. (I study 20th century, so I’m only going back so far, but it probably applies to earlier periods too.) Just as there are generational cycles, there are cycles of generational tongue-clucking over the wretched state of the new generation. In the 1920s, youth and twenty-somethings were bemoaned as being depraved and self-indulgent. In the 60s, ditto. When the footage of all the hippies rejecting the “military-industrial complex” and the marchers protesting the Vietnam war hit the airwaves, there were dozens, hundreds of articles, op-eds, etc., declaring that this was the generation that had been “Spocked when it should have been spanked.” In other words, they’d been raised too indulgently, with too much attention to their feelings, and now were spoiled, self-centered brats. Sound familiar, anyone?
Back to the present day: Having gone to undergrad at an Ivy and as a grad student at another one, I feel like it’s not the students who go into deep debt who are the entitled ones. It’s generally the ones who’ve never HAD to think about debt, whose parents are able to fork over the full amount, who are the most entitled. Some of them (not all, but some) seem to think that because they’re paying such an obscene amount for their education, they should get the grades they think they’re paying for.
The sad thing is that I know so many people who aren’t able to pursue what they want to do (social work, teaching, arts, non-profit work) because they have to go get a high-paying job to pay off their enormous debt. If wishing that they could serve humanity rather than shill for a corporation is entitlement, then I guess they’re entitled. But they’re grateful just to have those jobs, since it’s so hard to make ends meet these days.
Oh, and one last rant: that’s a nice trick they pull, blaming the financial problems of young people on their “narcissism,” rather than on the fact that wages have been stagnant, education costs have been rising at well above the rate of inflation, and housing costs are astronomical. Because, you know, those last things are POLITICAL issues, rather than personal ones, and they’re political issues that the current party in power has only exacerbated.
I can’t tell you how furious assumptions like that make me.
My boyfriend has gotten royally shafted by the college loans process. He got out of UNDERgrad over $100,000 in debt. Why? His parents’ salaries weren’t low enough to get him any financial aid. Which is bullshit since they don’t earn nearly enough to even consider paying for his school, he has a younger sibling who started college just after him, and his mom was driven out of her job shortly after they both began school. I’m all for giving financial aid to those who “need it” (I was actually one of the lucky ones who needed it badly enough to actually GET it) but the bar for who needs it is set rather ridiculously. Plus, what about the kids whose parents AREN’T supportive? Who cares if Parent earns six figures a year. Parent could be an asshole who doesn’t want to put one cent towards his/her “18-so-now-they’re-magically-an-adult” offspring’s education.
But loans are fine for students like him, right? Thanks to the Prestigious (read: expensive as fuck) School he went to and the Marketable Degree he graduated with, he’ll of course be getting a high-paying job as a corporate drone at somewhere like Google, Microsoft, Apple, you name it! Right?
Wrong. Aside from the kind of silly unspoken bias he encountered at some of his interviews (*place which shall remain nameless* reserves 70% of its spots for Stanford alums, based on the old boys’ network), he doesn’t WANT a corporate-slave job. He’s currently starting his own very cool company with a few other guys – they’re all working their asses off and the company is flourishing. He likes the work, and wants to keep doing it. But his loans are devouring his entire income.
In short, to me loans seem like a surefire way of forcing graduates back into the corporate machine, the only place they’ll possibly be able to work if they want to pay off their loans before they turn forty. Which is about the time that their kids will be going to schools that cost $60,000 a year and taking out loans of their own – because their parents earn a decent salary and they therefore get no financial aid.
My education didn’t cost nearly as much as y’all are talking about, but it cost me enough in loans that I’m seriously hurting now. What kills me is that I spent my entire time in undergrad raising Ethan on the maximum loans and grants I could get — which isn’t that much — without outside employment except for occasional design jobs, so I could actually spend some time with Ethan — and because additional employment would cut into my loans — all the while knowing (knowing) that if I could only get a degree I would be okay.
Flash forward and I’m working ridiculous hours, not even making double minimum wage, behind on bills (but the loan payments are okay!), because the job market is bad. And I mean bad. Sure, the job market is bad around the country, but you try living in an area flush with college graduates that has two total industries and you don’t know jack about either of them. Add that you’re trained as a teacher and every school system in your area is cutting costs (i.e. teachers) and aren’t hiring, no how, no way. Nor are you connected in any meaningful way to the people of power around you, whereas many of those fresh-faced college grads are, and they’re doing a-okay while you look on sideways wondering where the hell you went wrong.
Choices? Move away from your support system or live the best way you can here. Maybe grad school? But isn’t going to the same grad school where you went to undergrad considered gauche? Who the fuck knows? Linda Hirschman hasn’t written that book yet.
Moral of the story: Lawyer Mikey has much better luck at finding gainful employment than I do, given his education and location, but a college degree, excellent grades and excellent references don’t guarantee a goddamned thing. The debt, on the other hand, is solid.
If one takes loan to finance better prospects in life, to get a good job, one is lazy and selfish, but if one doesn’t get a loan to finance studies and instead remains content in McJobs, well, I suppose that too makes one lazy and selfish.
I think that’s okay, because then you know your place. But high school students who work hard to get into a good college and take out loans (and expect good teaching) once they’re there clearly have aspirations above their station. (I’m a TA, by the way, and I virtually never encounter the entitled, spoiled undergrad that’s supposedly so prevalent today.)
I do think the “Generation Me” has a high level of entitlement, but I can think of better examples of it than this.
I’m have student loans out my ass. I often joke that the government should transfer part of student loan debt to a guaranteed mortgage so I can one day afford to own a home…it’s all their money anyway.
How did he or anyone get shafteed by the college loan process? You know how much it’s going to cost you going to X college in Y city going into it.
But, here’s the bottom line. I chose to go to not one, but two private schools for undergrad and graduate school when I had access to good public universities. I wanted to go to a different school for grad school than the one I chose, but knew that there was no way I could’ve lived in the city as a broke-a*& grad student without taking out even more student loans than I did.
I knew going into it that I would NEVER make enough money in my degree field (social work) to justify what I spent on the degree and pay off over $100K in loans between both degrees. But, I did it anyway and am literally paying the consequences monthly.
I’m not mad at policy makers and am thankful to have a job that allows to live and barely make my loan payments (after damn near 4 years in forbearance). Would I like a break? Hell yeah, but I’m not expecting to get it anytime soon. I CHOSE to go to schools I did, and with choice comes responsibility.
God damn those non-upper class children and their sense of entitlement to ‘education’ and ‘access to opportunity’! They’ll have all the opportunity they need; to ask the scions of real citizens if they want coke with that.
The whole system sucks. Go into debt—significantly—at the start of your adult life and then spend years or decades paying it back? And then there’s the mess that is the federal student aid program—one of my friends had to take an unplanned semester off because her financial aid didn’t come through (and her family is definitely poor enough to qualify for it); another has developed problems with her student aid after the semester started; she’s got her classes paid for but has nothing left over for rent, and my parents are lending her money to cover it. Meanwhile I’m about ten grand in the hole (not counting what my parents lent me) and you astound me, Jill; I can’t even conceive of owing $200,000—I turned down a fantastic art program because its tuition came to a total of sixty thousand.
And, yeah, the credit card sharks are definitely out there—I (stupidly) applied for credit cards because it got me a free pizza and ice cream, on a day when I was broke and hungry. At least I can manage to budget things; the custom-made leather pants and the $180 pirate hat can wait.
I imagine Tuomas, that statement is tongue in cheek, because frankly, if there exist free education grants, I wanna get ‘em for me or my kids.
My kids are now entering time to go to school and they are balking at it for fear of loans, I have to provide my tax return as proof of income qualifications for government loans. My goal is to be successful in my business and get the hell of out of poverty. But, if I even get slightly above survival level, then possibly, my children’s opportunity to go to school fulltime will disappear.
Its a double bind that people like the writer above is well aware of but like the current administration, could give a shit about.
I have my own student loans to deal with and in fact, never finished school after nearly four years of attendance at three different colleges pursuing three different majors, since being a single parent is such a picnic and I couldn’t be bothered to finish school. Of course.
Ten years ago a Pell Grant got me $500 and I was single parent living at 200% of the poverty level. When I hear people talk about “free education on government grants” in a serious way, my ears almost start to bleed.
Stay out of my country*. I’m one of them anti-immigration loons. ;)
Not really free, but tax-payer paid. Of course, you have to beat all the other applicants (the good places are limited) which isn’t a small feat on the more popular and desirable sciences (law, economics, medicine etc.).
Even though I’m somewhat critical towards welfare state, government-provided education really is good for the economy, and ensures equality of opportunity, which I imagine most people consider important.
*I’m Finnish, if someone at this point doesn’t know.
Oh, hello, shouldn’t we be wondering why tuition goes up at a way the hell higher rate than inflation? This was one of those Big Imponderables when I was at law school a dozen years ago, when tuition was a comparatively less-vomit-inducing 20 grand.
Oh, and we found out that our tuition bore no actual relation to the cost of providing the education, since we were expected to not only pay tuition for the services and whatnot provided by the main university, but also for the law school and other graduate programs (seriously, we found out that law students, like blue states, paid way the hell more into the university system than we got out of it (we were subsidizing, for example, the medical and dental schools).
/end thread drift
But really, from the article:
Clearly parents are partly to blame, too, for not setting clear limits on how much they are willing to financially bail their kids out. Getting money from parents (for basic needs, not luxuries) in itself isn’t bad, but having daddy and mommy to happily bail you out from every mistake you make isn’t exactly healthy and does lead to serious entitilement issues. And the problem is that often others feel a need to adopt a similar outlook just to keep up and not become pariahs..
kate, Tuomas is from Finland, where the idea of free education for all isn’t quite so alien as here.
I also wore the polo shirt ironically.
Mikey, I hope you did your hair ironically as well.
(Sorry, I had to.)
Zuzu, the Federal gummint has more important things to do with our money than educate the masses.
There is still such a thing as free money for school. It’s just getting harder and harder to qualify.
I’m one of them “entitled” kids who actually has a free education. Sort of. My financial aid hasn’t come through yet because of issues at the university level. Anyway, it’s a strange situation and I won’t get into specifics, but the reason why I get money to go to college is because I’m an independent in the true sense. I was a ward of the court (I guess) after my mom died and had legal guardians until I turned 18. Sounds kind of sick to say, but I’m a lucky person. I have never had a problem getting money for school. I have never been denied aid and I even had my application fees waived when I applied. It’s not really that uncommom either, I’ve discovered. So is it narcissistic and self-serving to take advantage to the one good thing that came out of this mess known as my life? I don’t think so. I’m fucking grateful to have been given opportunity. I just find it horrible that one pretty much has to be in my situation in order to even get any kind of help.
No, that was sincere.
This one’s fun, as I’m going through it right now. I’m 17 and still live with my parents and attend community college. My parents are… you know, absolutely fucking insane. And I get financial support for school when it’s convienant for them.
So the beginning of my second semester here happened to be inconvienant for them. And here I am at the fin. aid office trying to figure out if there was a way to get a voucher so I could simply buy a WebAssign access card. Mind you, I had exactly 0 textbooks because of my parents doing this, so I was going for the bare minimum and just trying to get this damn card.
‘You have to prove estrangement [or some word to that effect] in court.’
‘Umm… listen, I seriously just need a $10 voucher for this card. I don’t even want my textbooks anymore.’
‘You don’t qualify for it because we can only consider you under your parents’ income.’
‘But I don’t BENEFIT from my parents’ income half the time. And I don’t have my own income at the moment.’
‘You have to prove it in family court.’
:\
Thankfully I did end up getting the card. But my situation is so fucking bizarre and has quite a bit of extenuating circumstances and uh, it seems that no-one cares and there’s nothing I can do.
I don’t know, while I can see the point being made here about hard working kids trying to navigate the financial holocaust that is getting a collage education (and since a masters degree is the new bachelors degree…)., I also drive by the local High School in my ten year old Saturn and see the student parking lot filled with Hummers, When I was living in a student ghetto around the University of South Carolina the driveways were filled with Escalades, Land Rovers, and tricked out sports cars. Anecdotal? Sure, but the point is that when I was going to school having a car at all, even a beater was not the norm, even among the kids who’s parents were well off.
I realize that for every Hummer driving, credit card slinging young adult there are 4 who live far below that level, but there has been a sea change since I went to school. On the other hand I think collage level work is harder now then it was back in the day when I was coasting my way to a bachelors degree at $45 a credit hour.
Yeah, we should waste hundreds of billions of dollars on occupying and “rebuilding” a foreign country instead. Then the money goes where it belongs–the private corporations being paid outrageous fees for their substandard work.
Why did I click on that? If I’d wanted to hear how it’s selfish and irresponsible to go into debt or – shock! – buy a couple of little treats to keep you sane when that money could go towards what you owe, I could have called my mum.
Yes, I’m one of those indebted graduates who dares to keep spending money on little things, although very little of my debt is my student loan. I don’t come from the socialist utopia of Finland, but here in GB student loans are… not horrendous, at least. If you can prove you’re making less than 85% of the national average wage, you can suspend repayments at a fairly low interes rate (I can’t prove it, so I have to pay), and if you become a teacher the government pays your loan off for you.
My debt comes from the way I worked every job I was offered until I had a minor breakdown and couldn’t work for months. That’ll cripple you financially every time.
Oh, this was another issue in law school. Seems that, at least when I was in law school, professional schools didn’t follow the same rules for financial aid that other graduate programs did. So on your FAFSA, you had to provide your parents’ financial information if if you were under 24 or if your school required it — and law schools required it. Regardless of how old you were, how long you’d been independent, or anything else.
This, of course, led to some absurd results. Such as the woman in my class who had raised six children and was going back to school in her 40s, and who had to get a notarized statement from her mother’s nursing home that, no, she had no income, and no, she wasn’t mentally competent anyhow since she had Alzheimer’s.
Another thing that drives me crazy is the advice not to, say, buy yourself a latte on occasion. It’s not the latte that’s making you debt-ridden, it’s the insane cost of tuition which necessitates borrowing more money.
But the teevee said I needed all that stuff! And it didn’t say nothin’ about how hard it is to pay for college!
I don’t know- even entitled and lazy college students like me aren’t really that bad I think. (Ok, I’m a grad student) I have tons of debt from undergrad, like 15k or some ridiculous sum. I came back home and am lazy and don’t work, as I have a terrible tendancy to somatize under stress(i.e. even working part time in undergrad was enough to give me enough mysterious aches, pains and tiredness to bother the whole medical community). But it’s not like I spend tons on credit cards- because I don’t need to pay rent or pay a car note. If I had those expenses, I would be in thousands of credit card debt because the amount of work I could do (esp. work that understands when you have a 15 page paper and a 10 page paper due in the same week) would not be enough to keep everything paid. We all need a place to live and in many cities, you need a car(if you get a beater, you have to pay tons in repair. It’s actually less expensive to have a fairly nice car because it won’t break down every five minutes).
If I had a child, hahahaha, no. And many girls my age do have kids. I was at the wedding of a girl who had her child let’s see, I think either sophmore or juinor year, sept 23rd. (she’s only a year older than me). Even though her mom helped, the kid still needed diapers and the general sundries that a kid needs. Yea, in my old school, there were folks driving around in expensive BMWs, but that’s not most college students today. And they do that because their parents are rich. They have had those cars from high school.
But what rich people do and what the rest of us do is different is what I mean.
Yes it does! Every election season, there’s commercials that come on, telling Jamie Average Voter that tuition costs are through the roof and implying that the candidate in question will do something about it. (And sometimes more than implying—I have on my refridgerator a campaign flyer that says the candidate, quote, “will make sure tuition returns to an affordable rate for students.”) (And if anybody wonders why I have it on my refridgerator, it has pizza delivery numbers on it. Which I pay for in cash, thank you very much.)
Kiss my ass, old people. We didn’t raise ourselves to be narcissistic little shits, did we?
Since no one else really responded to #4-
‘I feel like it’s not the students who go into deep debt who are the entitled ones. It’s generally the ones who’ve never HAD to think about debt, whose parents are able to fork over the full amount, who are the most entitled. Some of them (not all, but some) seem to think that because they’re paying such an obscene amount for their education, they should get the grades they think they’re paying for.’
Betsy, thanks for including ‘not all, but some.’ I’m one of those assholes, but I hope a sense of entitlement has never come with the package. I grew up on a farm, where a hard day’s work was pretty much every day. My dad in particular made a real point of telling me once, on a particularly long and exhausting day, that a lot of people in the world have to work that hard every day just to live. That really stuck with me. It stuck with me enough, in fact, that it was pretty easy to forget that my parents had saved enough to send my brother and me to college even though my grandmother stepped in and picked up the tab. She’s now paying for my grad school, and my parents are helping me pay rent because I can only work part time and still go to classes.
This doesn’t mean that I’m independently wealthy, or that once I get my master’s I’m going to move into a McMansion and dick around with a chunk of change from mommy and daddy. It also doesn’t mean that I’ve ever expected grades higher than I deserve. According to the Metro (it made me a little sad on my way to work last week) I’m part of the bottom nine percent that didn’t graduate with honors. It just means I don’t have to schedule my life around debt.
And speaking of, I think the financial aid process seriously needs an overhaul from what I’ve read here and what I’d already heard from friends. Children of divorce can be hit especially hard; a friend only found out as she was applying that her dad made a shitload of money, which prevented her from getting an aid package, but because her parents are estranged and her dad’s a dick the shitload wasn’t doing Anything for her.
I’d love to chime in with a “right on” here, but I must be honest and say that I’m one of those folks who’s made a few too many bad spending decisions who allows folks like Twenge to make everyone else in undergrad/grad school look bad. Sorry about that.
(Though I don’t feel there’s any “entitlement”. I’ve incurred debt – massive debt – and I know I have to pay it back somehow. Even if it means never retiring.)
And while the “entitled college student” stereotype is definitely overblown, I will say that in my years of TA-ing and lecturing, I’ve run into a few people who’ve essentially made the argument that they pay for grades. These are the same folks who argue over their grades without really considering why they got what they got. Thankfully, though, there aren’t too many of these folks.
bless you.
as a recent MSW grad in NYC, i have 2x more student loan debt than yearly income, after two years of sacrifice and credit card debt just trying to pay the rent and put food on the table. of course there are those (i knew them well) whose parents footed the tab for tuiton, Manhattan rents, and a DKNY interview suit, but most folks i know were in the same ramen-eatin’ place i was. i hate that cultural myth that says we’re a lazy, spoiled generation—we work our asses off and there ain’t no makin it.
I’m an undergrad at Georgetown right now. I could have gone to school back home for free, but I wanted the best education I could get. As a result, after this and law school, I’m sure I’ll also be $200,000 in debt. Honestly, I’m not worried. Even if I’m paying on it until I retire, the education and experience are worth it to me. The government can (and might!) take everything else from me, but my mind, my education, the ideas I have been exposed to here… that’s something they can never have. It’s mine forever. Assuming I pay my debt back, I’m going to contribute to the university to help it fund scholarships, as part of the reason I’m in so much debt is because our endowment is not large enough to give tuition breaks/merit scholarships to any but a desperate few AND lure top-notch profs AND build more buildings AND everything else a high-quality university has to do to stay that way.
Whenever I hear of a professor taking a line like this, I ache to ask him or her a few questions:
1) What role do you think universities play in the financial burdens of students? Specifically, (a) how much has your institution raised tuition over and above inflation? (b) how much does your institution spend on hifalutin’ research and superstar professors whom most undergraduates will never see?
2) What relation do you think (1a) has to the scandalously low workload of many tenured professors?
3) When was the last time you were even in the same room with an undergraduate?
Fuck me, as a(n only just) ex-student in the UK, this makes sobering reading. Just before I went to university, mandatory tuition fees were introduced. Last year top-up fees – raising the amount by two and a half times – were brought in, just in time for my little brother. Now some of the ‘top’ universities are claiming these aren’t going to be enough and that they should be able to charge what they want since they’re competing in a worldwide marketplace these days.
What does this mean? That my parents may not have enough money to stay above the poverty line when they retire, and that both of us (more him of course) are going to be saddled with a huge debt when our degrees can’t even guarantee us a job. I know for a lot of you that’s already a common occurence, but it’s a hit in the gut for us because it’s a relatively recent development, brought in by a government which frequently pays lip service to supporting education, and who skirted through the system without fees, but with generous grants given to many of them in order to pursue their own higher education.
My first reaction was “hey, I thought the baby boomers were the selfish narcissists.”
I do understand the problem that students have with loans today and agree that there should be more aid and the system needs overhauling. (Contrast today’s costs to mine, circa 1973: My undergrad degree from NYU cost around $12,000 total for tuition and fees.)
Long time, no bitching, Lauren… But I can say with reasonable certainty that for many purposes, getting a grad degree the same place you finished undergrad is not a horrible option. At least, I sure the fuck hope that it isn’t.
There *might* be a concern if you are looking for a job in the ivory tower, and you get both your initial and terminal degrees at the same place.
From personal experience, I don’t think having a BA and MA from the same place is going to hurt me that much. Because I don’t know what I’m going to do with either of them in the first place.
Give a stranger a shout sometime if you want some company / distraction / beer. :)
ARGH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
Man! So much easier to blame the students than to actually figure out how to help them find a way through these crushing mountains of student loan debt and declining beginning salaries for young professionals.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! It makes me want to SCREAM!
Reading this makes me so, so damn grateful I live in Canada. I go to a decent-ish university, not a fabulous one by any means but not a wretched one either, and the tuition is around $4,200CAD/year. That’s little enough that with careful enough saving with my job as a secretary, I can afford to support my as-yet-not-immigrated partner, pay the rent and afford my tuition without having to go into debt. I know that isn’t the case for everyone – not everyone can land an office job straight out of highschool, or find good roommates, or even has the health to be able to work full time and go to school at night – but I think we tend to get a much fairer shake at it here, particularly because we don’t have alot of the factors that impoverish the middle class in America (ie, we actually have healthcare).
Tuomas said:
Frankly, I think the article is flat out wrong on its assertion that parents are sitting there, ready willing and able to bail out little Dick and Jane for their bad judgment. Does it happen? Sure. I went to private school all the way through high school and saw it, but I think the phenomenon is a lot less common than the article makes it sound. There are parents who can afford it and who do it, but in my experience, that’s the exception rather than the rule.
Zuzu said:
That isn’t the case any more, at least not at all law schools. During my years at my law school, I never had to provide the financial aid office with any of my parents’ financial information, which is a good thing, as I would have been utterly screwed in that case, as my parents’ income is just high enough to disqualify me from subsidized loans, but not high enough for them to be able to contribute anything to law school (especially with my three younger sibs still at home). Then again, I probably could have gotten out of any of those requirements – even if they did still exist – since I am married and was married during school.
Now as far as the overall point of the post is concerned, well, I’m going to have to move over to my own blog and post something on it there, since that’s a major rant and I don’t want to monopolize y’all’s space.
Thanks for posting the article.
A lot of what has been said so far is true. As Mikey’s rommate, the author of the author clearly painted a misleading picture of his situation. Especially since he has taken jobs and contributed much of his money to causes many would consider to be very worthy. He is nowhere near as irresponsible and privileged as she makes him out.
BUT. I don’t think the larger issue is being treated all that fairly. I am also going to be in 6 figures worth of debt when I graduate. But I made that choice consciously and I don’t blame the government or anyone else for it. And I have no sympathy for those who go into 6 figures worth of debt during undergrad. It was their choice. I made the choice of going to a tuition free state university. All of you Harvard and NYU people can look down an me for the rest of your lives, but you can’t simultaneously bitch about how unfair it was that you had to pay over 100 grand for the opportunity to do so.