*Daily Caller: Noël Flynn is spending more than 80 percent of her income to pay back tens of thousands of dollars in debt for her Art Therapy degree. In 2016 alone, the Department of Education loaned $25.9 billion to students who, like Flynn, chose degrees under the umbrella of the liberal arts and humanities, an analysis by The Daily Caller News Foundation found.
A significant portion of those students are unlikely to have the means to pay back their debt after graduating.
*The Daily Caller story, and its cited statistics, relied on this very important source —> Comet Financial Intelligence.
“I find myself struggling financially, and the biggest reason why is student loans,” said Flynn, 23, who says she was told the loans “wouldn’t be overwhelming” once she graduated.
Most federal student loan programs do not require a credit check, nor do they require a cosigner. Rather, the loans are backed by nothing more than the borrower’s future earnings with a college degree, but the kind of degree isn’t a consideration in the loan process.
“What you make depends on what you take,” Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, wrote in a 2016 report. “A major in social work pays $30,000 a year compared to $120,000 a year for a major in petroleum engineering.” Business, vocational, and STEM majors all have significantly better chances of paying off their loans, TheDCNF’s analysis of federal data shows.
In addition to lower pay, many liberal arts and humanities majors enter a job market with less opportunity, leading to high rates of unemployment and underemployment, according to the New York Fed.
Are students being set up to fail?
The $25.9 billion in arts and humanities represents a massive annual investment in students who are likely to struggle to pay back their loans. MORE
I’d bet that there’s more money with a degree in underwater BB stacking than there is in a degree of art therapy. Whoever heard of art therapy before now? I guess someone has to explain modern art to all the plebes and philistines out there. And I thought my BA in Social Work was worthless.
College Counselor: “Sure, you can make loads of money with a degree in Gender Studies. You’ll have that $80,000 loan paid back in no time at all.”
End and outlaw any future federal “department of education”. The framers would be ashamed of such a thing. Another great “gift” from Jimmy the Peanut, like turning Iran over to the mulahs, giving away the Panama Canal and telling Billy blowjob to give nuclear reactors to North Korea. He may actually be a bigger traitor than McCain.
Fat, drunk and stupid and now we have to actual add “getting a degree in art therapy” is no way to go through life.
After seeing what is considered art nowdays I’ve sometimes considered therapy.
It would be interesting to do a comprehensive study of pay by major and then grant loans based on the expected future earnings with that particular degree. Want to major in Lesbian Dance Theory? Okay, but at $15/hour, we’re willing to loan you $10,000.
A big chunk of student loan debt is with for-profit institutions like beauty schools. Really, how likely is it that a beautician, straight out of school, is going to be making enough to pay off a $20,000 student loan, let alone care about paying it off?
After the federal takeover of student loans (another gift of Obamacare) millions of “students” began taking out loans to take classes at community colleges, primarily to skim the amount allotted for additional expenses. Many of them never attended classes. They treated the money as a grant. They have no intention of paying it off. Their understanding was that the Democrats would eventually regain power and forgive the loans. Not a bad bet.
Higher Ed is always a gamble. Careers that look promising when you begin a program can become saturated or irrelevant before graduation. A bank is more likely to be able to accurately weigh the risk, but only if they face all the risk of lending.
Guaranteed student loans seemed like a good idea at the time, but the reality is that it fed tuition, fee and book inflation, as schools, administrators, faculty and publishers grew fat.
After Obamacare and the Stimulus Package, there was a feeding frenzy in Higher Ed that has not stopped since. These institutions are now facing a crisis, as enrollment has dropped significantly, but they rush doggedly along, pushing an agenda of Cultural, Societal, Economic and Political change (note the absence of academic standards), again, assuming an eventual return to Democrat leadership and largesse (with other people’s money).
Student “loans” aren’t loans in the strict sense of the word.
They are part of the vast income-redistribution to colleges, universities, and the grasping “professorial” maggots who run them.
Whether or not they’re “repaid” is quite beyond the point – the student remains a dullard and the professoriat has enriched itself tremendously – THAT money will never be reclaimed by the individual taxpayers who got fucked out of it.
Most colleges and universities produce nothing worthwhile. A few medical schools, a few business schools, some engineering schools, some rare schools which produce giants of scientific thought – but for the most part they’re only indoctrination centers who steal from their students and alumni (and the taxpayers) to feed the worthless parasites who operate and “teach” at the schools.
But, this isn’t a new problem – same old shit’s been carped about since the days of Goethe and Carlyle.
izlamo delenda est …