Student Loan Debt: Who Are the 1%?
economix.blogs.nytimes.com
economix.blogs.nytimes.com
Then there is the issue that she is not even including anyone who graduated in less than 6 years! It's hard to imagine that if we saw those numbers they wouldn't skew the curve as well. The whole presentation reeks of cherry picked data classification.
> The chart below shows the percentage of beginning undergraduate students who, six years later, had accumulated more than the indicated levels of debt.
It's called "cumulative", and it is quite common, and not misleading. For this kind of presentation it is what you want because most people are interested in picking some particular debt level and saying "X% are above this debt level". If you don't do a cumulative chart, then you have to take all the bins above X% and add them up to get the number you want.
> Then there is the issue that she is not even including anyone who graduated in less than 6 years! It's hard to imagine that if we saw those numbers they wouldn't skew the curve as well. The whole presentation reeks of cherry picked data classification
Yes--it skews the numbers toward more debt and away from the point she is making it. This strengthens her point, not weakens it.
No it doesn't. I believe GP was pointing out how it further contrasts the lower debt loads against the higher debt loads, which I agree with. This layout definitely favors her point in a misleading way.
Part of the debt problem has been the dearth of students going into high demand majors (mostly STEM). We on hacker news know the benefit of a engineering/computer science degree and being even marginally good at it comes with great rewards.
STEM degrees are expensive - considerably moreso than, say, English degrees. This is especially true for professional degrees like engineering.
So yeah, your odds of employment out of school are much better than the English major, but your debt load has increased significantly as well. Getting a STEM degree can mitigate the effects of our ludicrously overpriced education system (i.e., you've got a shitload of debt, but at least you're chipping away at it, as opposed to not making your payments at all), it does not avoid it.
http://students.sfu.ca/calendar/for_students/undergrad_tuiti...
On top of that, majoring in something technical will also likely require more fees -- lab fees, computer fees, etc.
Oh, and your book costs will be higher. Textbook prices have tripled in the last ten years, so now an English Major is paying what I paid for Computer Engineering back in 2000.
Incidentally, there are very few engineers in NC State's contingent of occupiers.
This seems inaccurate to me. I graduated from a Canadian University (which are very cheap for the quality of education they provide) and accumulated ~30K in student loans for tuition and living expenses.
If I went to a school of similar caliber in the US, I would need more than that for a single year!
The article is talking about debt after graduation, not total cost of the degree.
There are many ways to lower that debt, mostly by paying it off before graduating with: student's money, parent's money, government financial aid, school financial aid, school scholarships academic or otherwise, 3rd party scholarships, etc.
http://tibbon.tumblr.com/post/13839164804/i-am-the-1-of-stud...
Its the perspective from someone that is in well over 100K of student loan debt- me.
It's really too bad that students are sandwiched between the "Gimme everything now!" attitude and such a grim employment outlook, but since when should you not have to repay what you borrowed? It's almost like such easily available credit of the past few decades has caused us to forget what exactly a loan is: borrowing money with the promise to repay it in the future.
Unfortunately, you don't get a second chance. How many things did you have to sign at 18 years old that will haunt you to your grave?
As for when you should not have to repay what you borrowed, well, that is pretty common in business and no one plays the deadbeat card.
I completely agree that there is a lot of pressure to go straight into the most prestigious college you can. Between for-profit college TV ads pressing the importance of a degree, school counselors telling you to "aim high" and constant expectations of everyone around you it's much easier, socially at least, to go straight for the expensive university. It's nothing new, though; as Henry Ford put it, "Luring people into debt is an industry." Looks like that industry is still going strong.
I didn't mean to come across as arrogant with my first comment. It's certainly hard to go against the current, and I think the main problem is schools and parents not encouraging an affordable college, at least for the first few years, as a viable option. People just tend to be blinded by hype and expectations, not wanting to disappoint the family name. There's certainly a lot of that attitude where I went to school.
I'd like to see a graph of 5 or 10 years after college graduation.
Edit: I was misinformed about college loans, please read the comments below this post. It is worse than I thought.
If people are leaving school and jobless, then any debt is going to be rough on them.
As a result, money ended up being a big part of the graduate program I chose. This allowed me to actually make money on graduate school. The lesson being: college is a system, and you should learn to game it.
Same with graduate school. Hustle it.
Downvote all you like, but I've learned a few things through three degrees at three different universities, and my advice remains the same -- particularly for anyone attending a for-profit school or graduate school:
If you plan on going to college, learn to game the system.