Girl's

On a recent episode of the HBO series “Girls” the lead character Hannah, played by the show’s creator Lena Dunham states that she is not “trained to do anything.”  This comment has stayed with me in light of all the mewing about the student loan debt crisis.  This “crisis” has prompted those paragons of virtue moveon.org to start a website called signon.org that has a morally reprehensible petition called “Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012” (less said about this the better).

A good friend recently sent a post to Facebook lauding the purity and higher good of education, i.e. college should not be turned into vocational training, and I agree.  That useless degree in journalism is fine if you or your parents have the wherewithal to pay for it.  On the other hand IF you are going to graduate with that degree in journalism and $10’s of thousands of dollars of student loan debt then you are going to have to address the responsibility of paying that loan back.  You cannot blindly stumble into one of the cockamamie new college degrees, accruing massive debt with no plan on how that debt is going to be repaid.  After all that “Women’s Studies” degree MIGHT not prove that marketable.  Couple this with the fact that the “Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012” might not pass and you are up shit’s creek!

I also wonder where are the adults in this travesty, are parents cosigning their children’s student loans on for these intellectually bankrupt college degrees (Women’s Studies, African American Studies) or traditional degrees with virtually no marketability; philosophy, psychology, sociology, journalism, etc.?  And what about the colleges, overpriced, creating contemporary “degree” programs and established programs for suckers.

Something certainly has to be done about the cost of college education; but writing off student loan debt while morally unconscionable will not help this problem, and would be college students are going to have to hit some balance between the cost of the degree/debt and their post degree earnings.