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posted by martyb on Thursday May 18 2017, @09:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-owe,-I-owe,-it's-off-to-work-I-go dept.

Another day, another record broken.

The debt held by US households has surpassed its pre-2008 record, several financial outlets note. A peculiar spotlight in the associated numbers falls on student loans, where delinquencies are multiple times higher than for other debt types: 10 percent is the norm.

That's some pretty troubling news for the economy [and wider society], notes Rana Foroohar at sister outlet the Financial Times. First off, there's the association between the rise in student debt, and a decrease in home ownership for young people. This connection is exacerbated by them millennials increasingly turning towards income-based repayment programmes, which spread out the debt over more years.

Secondly, the level of student debt delinquencies ain't changing: the 10 percent figure is a near-constant over the past 4-5 years. People who've ever had a delinquency -- even if they recover -- have a much lower rate of home ownership at age 30 as compared to their non-defaulted compatriots. Not having a home means not filling it with stuff, and filling with stuff is kinda what the economy is based on.

Then, thirdly, it's not only students that are hit by student debt: increasingly, their parents are taking on debt too, to help out. Fuel for that debt sandwich is something peculiar: the rate of inflation in college admission costs is three times higher than the consumer price index. Must be that college professors wages have increased a lot, then.

Given that boomers and their millennial offspring are the two largest voting blocks in the US, a snappy future president-elect might consider raising the issue a bit.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by quietus on Friday May 19 2017, @08:01AM (2 children)

    by quietus (6328) on Friday May 19 2017, @08:01AM (#512073) Journal

    Why is it that a college education is so expensive in the United States (and, increasingly, the UK), while it is nearly free in the EU?

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19 2017, @08:57AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19 2017, @08:57AM (#512091)

    Profit motivated textbook companies and tax cuts to defund universities and shift the costs on to the individuals in the form of student loans. Tuition skyrocketed and the university systems became major centers of corruption.

    Yay crony capitalism! The US painted socialism as the biggest bogeyman ever, there are literally millions of conservatives / libertarians who would happily shoot a "socialist" in the back if they thought they could get away with it. Education and healthcare should be socialized, most every other country gets that, but the rich keep chipping away at those ideas so they can privatize everything and suck money out of everyone while giving nothing back.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by kaszz on Friday May 19 2017, @02:22PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Friday May 19 2017, @02:22PM (#512186) Journal

      As the core business of Universities becomes all the more vulnerable to other methods to accomplish the same goal. They might have undermined themselves. Adding to the injury, if the work market for those exams are bad it will amplify the effect. The point of intelligent but poor students saying f-ck this is perhaps approaching.