Student Debt Shoots Through the Roof

By the end of the year, the total of student loan debt in the United States will reach $1,000,000,000,000 (a trillion dollars), according to Forbes magazine. Today, Finaid.org reports that students on average are borrowing twice as much as they did just ten years ago, which is probably in part due to the fact that the cost of tuition on average rises at a rate of eight percent a year and doubles every nine years.

Debt for college graduates is becoming a problem of increasing stature. Debt for higher education is now greater than the credit card debt of all Americans, and students on average have $24,000 in student loan debt alone, says the Project on Student Debt. But consider many students also have developed credit card debt as well.

After paying upwards of $25,000 for a bachelors degree, many students face a lagging job market and a burden of debt and are effectively forced to take jobs such as waiters or waitresses that pay under $4 an hour or other low paying jobs.

An English major on the UC main campus says, "I've been working since high school, and I am still $35,000 in debt because of my loans. It's hard to even think about buying a house, getting married and starting a family right now." This is the case for many students. In fact, last year, 85 percent of college seniors planned to move back home after graduating, according to a poll conducted by Twentysomething Inc. last May.

Gradually, the price of education is becoming indentured servitude. What will the cost of a bachelor's degree be in ten years? Or a doctorate in twenty? The trend shows no sign of slowing. Fresh out of college, there is a black cloud already following and burdening the graduates and educated people.

As costs sky-rocket, many students' career decisions are influenced by how much money they will make to quickly repay their monstrous debts. It is a sick system we are building if our education system only produces middle managers, bond traders and lawyers, rather than teachers, artists, and scientists. However, the Institute of International Education has found today that more students are studying visual and performing arts than engineering. But the question remains, in the future, how many people will become teachers when it costs $100,000 for a teaching degree as their salaries continue to be cut? With an education system like this, we are not producing educated, well-rounded individuals, but cogs for a redundant machine fueled by debt to serve the status quo, where the few profit on the backs of the many.

The value of some majors such as Liberal Arts and Philosophy and more obscure programs such as Archeology or Marine Biology are being questioned at some schools. Some say they should be cut in order to save money, because evidently the only majors with value are those that make a lot of money, or have "real world application." It screams irony to see the value of a real education in the arts or in English belittled while the prices of those programs shoot through the roof.

President Obama has recently been talking about plans for student loan forgiveness, which would help many, but that isn't solving the source of the problem: the rising cost of tuition. Maybe too many people are profiting from the way things are for there to be a change, but something has to give.