My girlfriend has some student loans that made me inhale sharply through my teeth when she described them to me. Her and her family are not good at finance or

My girlfriend has some student loans that made me inhale sharply through my teeth when she described them to me. Her and her family are not good at finance or math, and they got swept into the popular way of looking at college in America: Get into school, take loans, finish school, pay off loans. That was all true for a long time, but interest rates have risen sharply for loans in the last 5 years, and the value of a degree (especially a liberal arts degree) has fallen. I'm not making excuses for them, I'm just offering a data point. My feeling is that we're about to see a shift in the popular view of college, but these views always lag the reality. Because of this lag, newly graduating students are going to have it worst of all.