Student debt is unconscionable. We’re taking young people, giving them 13 or more years of “we’re taking care of you,” “you’re too young to worry about this,” a

Student debt is unconscionable. We’re taking young people, giving them 13 or more years of “we’re taking care of you,” “you’re too young to worry about this,” and suddenly they are legal adults, and the choice is theirs, but they really should consider taking on some debt to pay for school, because look at this pretty chart showing how someone with a college degree has so much more earning potential than someone who does not. It’s difficult to process just how expensive school is becoming, how quickly. Right now, California community colleges charge $46 per semester unit, or $1,104 full-time for 1 year, plus maybe $40 in miscellaneous fees. If you want a heavy course load, 17 units all year, that rises to $1,564. A bunch of students qualify for the Board of Governors Fee Waiver, but that generally means the their families have poor financial situations, too. How much did community college cost when you were a young adult? And that’s just the community college, in-state fees. 4-year colleges and private colleges are becoming ever more expensive, too. Adjusting for inflation, Stanford increased from $10,600 per year in 1960 to $59,600 now, just tuition, not counting miscellaneous fees or the cost of living in Palo Alto. And then there’s financial aid, of which there are nice grants for the destitute, enough to cover books and stuff, but mostly it takes the form of bankruptcy-immune student loans. Is it even possible to work part-time, go to school part-time, and graduate without debt, anymore? It certainly doesn’t help that most of the kids learn fantasy-world liberal social policies, and increase their own fees. For example, I watched the students at UC Santa Cruz protest the wages and working conditions from the prison-food multinational that ran the cafeterias, and they “won” when UCSC agreed to turn the service workers into UC employees. The next year, instead of cutting the salaries of the executives, UCSC made cafeteria meal plans mandatory for everybody. And then these kids grow up into adults who vote for every bond and regressive tax that plagues my ballot. As a caregiver and mentor, I’m not sure I can tell my kids to go to college.