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America’s $1.5 trillion student-loan industry is a ‘failed social experiment’
- anoncoward111 8y agoFor those who are hardest hit by student loans, they have become a pretty close approximation of indentured servants or sharecroppers. If the median college degree holding millenial is making ~50k per year, but is also spending 50k per year after taxes, rent, transport, health care, food/entertainment, and of course, loan payments, then they are not much better off than someone who is working for 30k and spending 30k. Now, we could make the assumption that the 50k job is more stable over the next decade, or that there is room for meaningful raises, but so far, the economy has not made this a statistical reality to my knowledge. It goes back to the days of the Irish laborer. The Englishman owned a farm with cattle in Ireland. He hired Irishmen and women to tend to the cows so that they could eventually be slaughtered and sold for awesome profits in London and Manchester. As a token prize for their labor, the Irish were allowed to sleep at the farm, eat butter from the cows and grow potatoes in the rocky soil in the ungrazeable land. This was a system that kept the Irish right in their places, until enough cycles of potato blight and English refusal of humanitarian aid resulted in nearly all of their deaths and deportation.
- Gibbon1 8y ago> pretty close approximation of indentured servants or sharecroppers. Considering student loan debt is not dischargable, it's an exact description.