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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAmericans owe $1.2 trillion in student loans, surpassing credit card and auto loan debt totals Read
Millions of Americans are in the same boat as these New Yorkers. Americans owe $1.2 trillion in student loan debt, a number that has tripled in the last decade. New York State residents hold $60 billion of that debt, and college grads in the state owe on average $27,310 in student loans, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Student loans have passed credit cards and auto loans to become the second biggest source of personal debt in the U.S., trailing only mortgages. Aware of growing public concern over the issue, Senate Democrats are making student loans one of their top election year planks.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/americans-owe-1-2-trillion-student-loans-article-1.1796606#ixzz328bZUNzI
blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)defacto7
(13,485 posts)American's want a job that education can help them get. That education has become so expensive that only the upper-mid and wealthy can afford it. People borrow so they can get a good job. The market goes dry and the jobs education was supposed to supply can't supply them. Debt is the outcome.
We need to have Open Source education where higher education is a tool we build with, not a financial end game for the higher education industry that itself has gone to the elite. The elite will buy the pedigree and get the job whether or not they earn it. The rest will be in a living debtors prison and have to take the jobs they would have had to take without the money they borrowed or the information they learned.
One more view of America with a SOLD sign on it.
Javaman
(62,530 posts)socialist_n_TN
(11,481 posts)Capitalism will always have bubbles or expansions, and then recessions because capital, especially rentier capital, needs to be destroyed for a new cycle of expansion to begin. This might be the next one OR the one after that, but it WILL happen because that's the way the game (system) is set up.
At the end stage, these expansions and contractions get harsher and harsher and come closer together not allowing the vast majority of people to recover.