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Student debt can impair your cardiovascular health into middle age, study finds:
"As the cost of college has increased, students and their families have taken on more debt to get to and stay in college. Consequently, student debt is a massive financial burden to so many in the United States, and yet we know little about the potential long-term health consequences of this debt. [...]
[...] Researchers assessed biological measures of cardiovascular health of 4,193 qualifying respondents using the 30-year Framingham cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk score, which considers sex, age, blood pressure, antihypertensive treatment, smoking status, diabetes diagnosis, and body mass index to measure the likelihood of a cardiovascular illness over the next 30 years of life. They also looked at levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a biomarker of chronic or systemic inflammation.
The researchers found that more than one third of respondents (37%) did not report student debt in either wave, while 12% had paid off their loans; 28% took on student debt; and 24% consistently had debt. Respondents who consistently had debt or took on debt had higher CVD risk scores than individuals who had never been in debt and those who paid off their debt. Interestingly, respondents who paid off debt had significantly lower CVD risk scores than those never in debt. They found clinically significant CRP value estimates for those who took on new debt or were consistently in debt between young adulthood and early mid-life, estimates that exceeded their counterparts who never had debt or paid it off. Race/ethnicity had no impact on the results.
[...] "Our study respondents came of age and went to college at a time when student debt was rapidly rising with an average debt of around $25,000 for four-year college graduates. It's risen more since then, leaving young cohorts with more student debt than any before them," Dr. Lippert said. "Unless something is done to reduce the costs of going to college and forgive outstanding debts, the health consequences of climbing student loan debt are likely to grow."
Journal Reference:
Adam M. Lippert, Jason N. Houle, Katrina M. Walsemann. Student Debt and Cardiovascular Disease Risk Among U.S. Adults in Early Mid-Life [open]. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2022. DOI: 10.1016/j.amepre.2022.02.002
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2022, @08:28PM (1 child)
make anus expand again. MAEA
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2022, @10:06PM
Hey everybody, the incel is back with their racial fetish. Not judging, but slurs not likely to get you laid. Maybe Clarence Thomas would be up for it if his wife told him to. He doesn't seem to have much self-respect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2022, @08:53PM (3 children)
These idiots should have incurred a bit more debt to take a course in introductory statistics. They would have learned that correlation isn't the same as causation. There's likely an underlying cause that results in certain people being more likely to take on debt and to have poor health... like not being rich.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2022, @09:57PM
Show us on the doll where the scientist touched you.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by PiMuNu on Wednesday June 08 2022, @12:39PM
FTFA
> This pattern persisted after adjustments for degree completion, socioeconomic measures, and other sources of debt.
I couldn't even be bothered to read the article, but I assume, as is normal in social non-science articles, the correction method and systematic error associated with the correction is not described. It is probably large.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2022, @01:47PM
I have observed many people who were once quite rich and privileged squander their resources as if the good times would never end.
They fill their heads with meaningless crap, obsess over everyone else's rank, privilege level, who's who kind of thing, and are about as useful as a bowling ball in a washing machine.
The supermarket tabloids are full of these stories. I watched a local megachurch collapse as the family kids got spoiled and had no idea how to maintain the place and sacrificed their ethics for dollar.
Afraid there wasn't very many joules in the Hour of Power.
Ever been around those whose parents/grandparents experienced the great depression? A lot of those parents taught those kids well.
You don't need a lot of stuff, but one desperately needs the wisdom to husband their resources. Stuff comes and goes. I find my greatest asset, other than love and health, is I know how to fix damn near anything. And how to repurpose. The ultimate recycle. I rarely pay full price for anything. Most of my stuff is stuff someone else tossed.
I'll freely admit I am rather appalled by how frivolously I see kids of wealthy parents squandering resources on frivolous junk trying to impress others by demonstrations of wastefulness.
They seem to place really high value on what people have, but seem to place little value on what other people are.
I place great value on my friend who fixes cars for a living. I place a negative value on those who obsess with money and rank. They may know the price of everything, but have no idea what it's worth.
I can probably tell you what's wrong with your car just by listening to it, but don't ask me about the game. I won't know anything about it. It doesn't affect me. Just not my bag.
(Score: 4, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 07 2022, @09:13PM (2 children)
Newsflash: being poor is bad for you.
Solution: just don't be poor. Brought to you by the trickle down crew.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2022, @11:26PM (1 child)
Actually, their results show that the ones that had debt but paid it off were better off than the ones who didn't have debt in the first place. So noodle that one.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday June 08 2022, @06:08PM
Seems probable that the whole thing is psychological in nature in the first place....
Paying my own loans off was definitely a victory that I do periodically remind myself of that gives me some kind of positive fee fees.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Tuesday June 07 2022, @09:39PM (23 children)
Taking on huge amounts of debt that will follow you for several years of your life. Doesn't matter why you took on the debt. I spent 8 years working for a 4 year degree just to avoid debt. It's yours, own it.
It's why I am 100% against Biden forgiving any student loan debt. You were smart enough to get into college, you should have been smart enough to sniff out the loan bullshit. Those pay for play colleges? Until folks start getting prison terms I'm not forgiving any loans.
Me? I worked 40 hours a week and went to college part time for 10 years to get my 4 year degree. I never took out a loan. I never asked my parents for money. I worked to pay the exorbitant textbook costs and stupid "student activity fee", which got me access to things I didn't have time to go to because, ya know, I was working 40 hours a week.
That said, It's disgraceful the Fed has allowed cash to flow to colleges, and the colleges have used that cash to make it way too expensive for the average Joe to attend college. When I went books were 2/3 of my cost. Teachers made sure my expensive books had a shelf life of 2-3 years. Then cue the English teacher who assigned 8-9 books for the semester, at, I'll be honest, used bookstore prices. We read 10-20 pages of those $4 books in a semester, writing a paper on each.
My solution? How long has it been since Calculus has changed for undergrads? Create a PDF textbook. Physics? PDF. Chem? PDF. Women's studies? Good luck with that if you get tangled up in that cluster of fucks.
Which brings me to, there are courses where there are right and wrong answers. Then there are courses where there are answers. Quit taking the former out to the doghouse because some women's studies group decided that 2 + 2 > 4 for some values of 2.
I came. I saw. I forgot why I came.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Freeman on Tuesday June 07 2022, @09:52PM (3 children)
There are resources out there. https://ocw.mit.edu/ [mit.edu] https://www.northeastern.edu/graduate/blog/what-is-open-learning/ [northeastern.edu] https://openlearning.mit.edu/ [mit.edu] https://solutions.openlearning.com/ [openlearning.com]
Then, more specific to the "free textbooks" please: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/ [umn.edu] https://www.oercommons.org/hubs/open-textbooks [oercommons.org]
The biggest trouble is getting faculty and/or schools to adopt free textbooks. There's been a slowly growing open learning environment out there.
Elsevier in particular has a bit of a reputation for being money grubbing. https://libraries.mit.edu/news/elsevier-boycott-grows-2/8246/ [mit.edu] https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2018/jun/29/elsevier-are-corrupting-open-science-in-europe [theguardian.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Informative) by unionrep on Wednesday June 08 2022, @12:02AM (2 children)
There is an semi-official TLA (Three Letter Acronym) for free textbooks: OER. (Open Educational Resources) [unesco.org]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday June 08 2022, @02:58PM (1 child)
That's the term I was looking for, but my brain was too melted to find.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 22 2022, @11:03AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2022, @09:52PM (5 children)
When did you do that though? The cost of a year at a 2 year school now is what a year at a 4 year school cost only 20 years ago. Likewise, the cost of books has doubled in price and taking 8 years to complete a degree means that by the time you complete it, you've got no idea what the jobs market is going to be hiring for. Also, chances are good that at some point in the process there will be a recession.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday June 07 2022, @10:15PM (2 children)
That's what is wrong in/with the system - going to the college to get a paper that will magically open(?) the job market for you.
It should be one goes to the college to better oneself, the graduation paper be damn'd.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 5, Interesting) by stormreaver on Tuesday June 07 2022, @10:46PM (1 child)
Before I went to college in the early 90's, I had been programming computers (games, productivity, device drivers) in BASIC, C, and Assembly for about six years. I applied for programming jobs, and initially got called in for several job interviews by several different companies. I was uniformly rejected for a uniform reason: no four-year degree. So I enrolled in college, got my four-year CIS degree, then started getting hired.
The rules of the game are stupid, but you have to play the game. If the industry won't hire without a four-year degree, then you get a four-year degree to get hired.
I tried working full time and taking classes part time, but I was still a freshman after five years. So I quit my job, took out student loans, continued living with my parents, and finished my degree in four more years. The rules are the rules.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday June 09 2022, @11:12AM
I got, late 80-ies, a BcS in physics (because I liked it) then worked in software engineering almost ever since (-1.5 years as a Desktop Publisher - my first encounter with a Mac).
It has been only one time that the employer wanted a degree paper and it was happy with the physics one.
With the note that I said "It should be", the conclusion seems to be YMMV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2022, @11:09AM (1 child)
You can't take 8 years to get a degree. For my Software Engineering degree, a course's credits expire after 7 years. Year 8 would mean repeating all the freshmen courses again. I mean you should breeze through those courses the second time, but you'd have to double your course load to complete your final year courses while repeating the freshmen ones.
At my college, the freshmen courses switched from Java to Python while I was there. I wouldn't be surprised if they switch to Javascript soon. I'd imagine History degrees don't change a lot in a single decade, but tech related degrees do. Oh, tuition is 40k a semester too. If you're managing that income in your off year then you don't need to go to college. Save all that tuition money and just buy the course's textbooks. Going both through undergrad and graduate school, let me give you young-ins some important knowledge. The professors simply teach what's in the book. You can attend class or read the book, you don't need to do both. Most people who attend class never look at the book, unless there's homework assigned from it. You can save all that tuition by checking a few college's websites, buying the books, then reading them yourself. Afterwards, pick a college and test out of nearly all the classes (assuming you still want the degree). You'll save a ton of money and you'll look awesome to every company hiring new grads. All it takes is a little grit and this little bit of wisdom. I've given you the wisdom...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday June 08 2022, @09:22PM
If that be so, then the degrees should also expire after 7 years.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2022, @09:54PM
There's a an increasing number of free text books out there now, because the prices have gone up enough to convince philanthropists to fund free alternatives. It's definitely not the best way, but the alternative was getting ridiculous.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2022, @10:03PM (4 children)
Your thoughts match your username, misogynistic douchebag. 8 years on a crappy salary is 100% not enough to fund any 4 year degree. Universal healthcare and education is the smart move for any society not looking to become the next North Korea.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2022, @07:00PM
Depends on where you are and where you're studying. In-state rates, especially if you start at a community college or similar, are often quite favourable and in reach of anyone who's not bumping along the breadline (and if you are, there are often scholarships and plans to assist you in getting through).
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday June 08 2022, @09:28PM (2 children)
Six years on crappy and modest working man's wages paid for my son's degree, along with a couple minor scholarships, and a couple small grants.
If you want to insist that it's difficult, I'll agree with you. If you insist that it can't be done, then you are wrong. Students who expect to sit around and party throughout their school career can't do that. Students looking for a free ride won't do it. Students who simply must have a degree from a major Ivy League school can't do it. But if you are intent on getting an education as cheap as possible, without going into debt forever, it can be done.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2022, @10:49PM (1 child)
Being a full time student has a time commitment similar to having a full time job or more. That is, you have 15 credit hours that you spend in class, but you also spend a considerable amount of time outside of class doing work for those classes. As a college instructor, I've often been told that students should expect to spend 2-3 hours working outside of class for every hour of class time. That brings students to a time commitment of 45-60 hours per week. Even if you scale that back to 12 credit hours of classes, it's basically the equivalent of a full time job. This depends on how much time students actually commit to their studies, but it's always going to be a substantial investment of time.
When students are also working full time, that's 40 hours per week and probably commuting to and from work. Trying to be a student while working full time, even if the student only takes six or nine credit hours per semester, will probably compromise the quality of the education received. It reduces the value of the investment that the student is making if they're trying to attend classes and fit in studying and working on assignments along with being employed full time. They just can't devote the attention to their classes because of the time commitment of working.
I'm teaching a class online this summer. It's very obvious to me that students who have full time jobs aren't able to invest as much time in doing the course work. Even if they're only taking my class, because it's compressed into an eight week session, it's like taking six credit hours.
From a societal standpoint, we all benefit from having a highly skilled workforce. These benefits are diminished when students graduate with less proficiency because they had to balance their studies with a full time job, and don't learn the material as well. The issue isn't that it's difficult, but that it reduces the value of the education.
Making knowledge readily available to all, including advanced knowledge and skills that are acquired in higher education, reduces inequality in society. Instead of concentrating knowledge and the associated power with a small group of elites, people are more able to think and do things for themselves. Making college so expensive that people rack up large amounts of debt is another way to cut off upward mobility in society. When people are knowledgeable and can think for themselves, they may start to question what they've been told, and they will probably be harder to control.
I believe that's why people like you want to make it more difficult to get a college education. That makes it easier to keep the elites in power, so they'll believe what they've been told.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 09 2022, @03:11AM
Nonsense. It's pretty simple economics, when you think about it. Let's say that you produce a product of some sort. About 2% of the population values your product enough to pay for it. Your product sells, a little bit, pretty consistently.
After a vastly successful marketing campaign (backed by government, I should add) you find that 30% or more of the population desires your product. Supply and demand allows you to increase the price of your product, and people keep on buying. People even borrow so that they can buy your product. You see this, and you increase prices some more.
Your product hasn't really gained any value - but the laws of supply and demand tell you that if people want your product badly enough to borrow for it, then you should raise your prices.
That's kinda what has happened with college education. The demand has skyrocketed, so prices have gone up. People are willing to pay for all the stupid shit, like 20% of staff being 'equity specialists' and 'social justice' and all the rest of what colleges have today.
Formal educaton is overhyped and overvalued. It's time we found some balance here. Economic says that you cannot justify mortgaging your soul for twenty years, just to get a degree in a worthless field of study that will never pay off.
Start slashing all the cruft from education, and costs can come down. Get those science paper journals under control, and you've taken a big bite out of the cost of education. Chase the social justice warriors out of their myriad offices, and that's another big bite. Get the cost of textbooks under control and that's another hefty bite. Virtually everything about college is overpriced, thanks to bullshit that contributes little or nothing to an actual education.
I won't argue the rest of you post. It makes sense, up to a point at least. Only to a point though.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2022, @12:57AM (3 children)
We tell people that they should get a college education, that it's necessary for upward mobility in society. Many jobs require college degrees regardless of whether the degree is actually essential to perform the duties of the job. Americans benefit from the economic growth that results from having an educated and highly skilled workforce. Even people who never went to college benefit from more Americans having a college education.
The Republican objection to forgiving student loan debt on the basis of it helping the wealthy is disingenuous. These same Republicans lined up to support Trump's tax cuts, which disproportionately benefited the wealthy. I'm sure there are a few millionaires with student loans to pay off, but these do not represent the large majority of people with student loan debt. Most of the people who took on student loan debt did so because they hoped and believed that they would be better off than had they chosen not to attend college. People are told that a college education is the way to upward mobility in society, but massive debt prevents people from actually achieving that mobility.
Your position is effectively that we should keep punishing the victims at least until we punish the criminals. This makes zero sense. It's a false dichotomy to oppose student loan forgiveness on the basis that it doesn't prevent student loans from being abused in the future. There is absolutely nothing that prevents Congress from forgiving federal student loan debt and simultaneously changing policies to prevent future abuses by colleges and universities.
Also, as a college instructor, I can assure you that faculty are very aware of the excessive prices of textbooks. Many of us work hard to find alternative materials for our courses to keep prices down for students. Not only that, but our supervisors also encourage us to keep costs for students at a minimum.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2022, @02:06AM (2 children)
People forget that we expect that teachers and social workers will have degrees, but the pay often sucks and isn't really enough to properly pay the loans. There's loan forgiveness, but that takes a decade currently and a change of administration could lead to it being effectively impossible to achieve.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2022, @10:06AM (1 child)
But they knew that the pay sucked when they started. Taking out excessive student loans for a career you *know* won’t earn you enough money to pay back the loan demonstrates that you are too stupid to justify going to college.
The real problem is that those people borrowed the money expecting the government to provide a miracle that would save them from their own stupidity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2022, @11:31AM
None of these people borrowed money expecting it to be forgiven by the government, at least not outside of the stated loan forgiveness programs that existed when they went into college. What you're claiming simply didn't happen. Well I don't know what the new students of the past few years have been doing, but everyone before that didn't have any thoughts of widespread loan forgiveness when they took out their loans.
The government needs to get out of shoveling money into students hands. It's had a drastic, negative effect on the cost of college with most of that money being sucked up by layers of university management. Secondary to that, if the government wants to try to correct some of the damage it caused by paying off some of the students' loans, so be it. Keep in mind all the stories you hear in the news about people getting their loans forgiven were things that were already supposed to have happened. If a college commits fraud or goes bankrupt, those students are supposed to get their loans forgiven. It's part of the contract terms you sign when you take out the loans. The previous student loans administration* illegally prevented those students from getting their loans forgiven. There were a bunch of class action lawsuits about it and the recent news of forgiveness over the past couple of years is basically the government settling those lawsuits with a positive spin to make it seem like they're helping people instead of simply doing what it was contractually obligated to do.
In terms of forgiving 10k, it's something Biden ran with during his campaign. I'm of the opinion that claims made during campaigns should mean something instead of simply being lies to trick people into voting for you. We're supposed to have truth in advertising laws. Going back on such things once you get into office should have negative penalties associated with it. You don't have to succeed, but you should have to make at least a good faith effort to try. Personally I think that was a stupid claim to make, but I wasn't the one to make it.
*Not linked with Presidential administrations
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2022, @04:19AM (1 child)
Well, you are right about one thing. Folks shouldn't have to take on debt to get an education.
Universities in many states of the US used to be free. Folks who didn't choose their parents well could get a degree, and have a better life than their parents.
Folks on the right like Ronald Reagan eliminated free university education. When Reagan sabotaged California Universities, he was being advised by Roger Freeman (Hoover Institute) who famously said,
“We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective about who we allow to go through higher education. If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people.”
Of course, "selective" meant creating the conditions for a permanent cast system where those who were not clever enough to choose their parents wisely, faced much higher friction in attaining a university degree than those who had demonstrated better judgement in choosing their parents.
Later some folks with good intentions came along and thought that guaranteed student loans would give folks a second chance who had made such poor choices in who their parents would be. But, these loans have only allowed fees to increase where, today, both fees and loans can be described as predatory.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @12:10AM
This is not flamebait. This is why we have the idle rich, and people who work their ass off and get nowhere.
Educate yourself. Start here to see how they do it.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=we+are+in+danger+of+producing+an+educated+proletariat [duckduckgo.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by deimtee on Wednesday June 08 2022, @05:01AM
If you're not going to have free education, then the right way is to do it like AU. The debt is basically held by the tax department and you pay a couple of percent extra on your income tax once you earn above the national average wage.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2022, @10:12PM (6 children)
Or perhaps dumb headline/writeup to attract millenials' eyeballs?
Why student debt specifically against cardiovascular health? Why not debt in general? Or simply being poor living off paycheck-to-paycheck? Or even chronic family squabble? Or...
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2022, @11:30PM (4 children)
Because they had a data set that followed the same students from secondary school through their late 20s. If you have a similar data set for the general population, I'm sure the researchers would be interested in seeing it.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2022, @11:33PM (3 children)
That don't explain why they pick college debt specifically. Stop defending garbage "research."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2022, @01:13AM (1 child)
Why not pick that? They're sociologists and this is what they study. One of the authors bio says "Jason Houle is a sociologist interested in social disparities in mental health and well-being, processes of social stratification and mobility, and life course sociology," which kind of describes this paper, wouldn't you say? Go to the research paper and see the other studies done in this area. Send the authors an email and ask them their motivations if you want, but don't be such a conceited ass to think that only the research deemed to be blessed and worthy by your highness is worthy of study. Go grab the data set they used and pull out whatever you find interesting and write it up. Sheesh.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2022, @11:07PM
When I wrote this last night, I was wrapping my answer good natured banter, but looking at it now I missed the mark and this has come off sounding rather mean spirited, so for that I apologize.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2022, @12:54PM
Because there's an actual separation of groups?
College students have credit card debt, too, so no interesting group divisions. Nobody statistically meaningful in their twenties or thirties has mortgage debt. Comparing known outliers to the group answers entirely different questions than the ones close to the one posed.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2022, @04:13AM
All sorts of debts accrued will cause the same physical/emotional problems. POTUS has already said he will "forgive" some student debt. There is an election in November. Why not forgive other debt accrued in someone's early 20s? This is about targeted spending, for the most political benefit.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday June 08 2022, @01:48PM
If The Market wanted graduates to have good cardiovascular health...
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].