Diploma mill university did not saddle me with an excessive student loan burden, but the more I peek and poke around it, eying to undercut any exorbitant interest payments for myself and not bankroll the loan sharks, the more I realize what a tar pit of inescapable debt, and perhaps the next financial bubble student loans are.
College Scholarships makes the issue, the game, wholly accessible, if still indigestible, with their infographic (what does that even mean? Rebus sentence, collage, vanity license plate?) in the marginalia. While at the height of the mortgage, sub-prime lending crisis--which the US has not exactly recovered or apparently gleaned much of a lesson from either, defaults on something so serious as home and hearth hovered at around a quarter of households. Student loan default rates for recent graduates, however, range from 30% to 60% and that's without any government intervention and forgiveness, which attempts to make amends to keep people from loosing everything, but defaulting on student loans has no recourse. Ever. Recent government reform, coinciding with student loan debt surpassing credit card debt in America, only served to cut out the intermediaries and keep more of the profit that high tuition and outrageous, long-lived repayment terms have milked from young people. Someone in America has the chance to start over through declaring bankruptcy and absolve bad credit, but the government will always recuperate student loans, with interest, for the academics that it vetted. This sort of servitude is despicable and self-perpetuating, either pushing young professionals to the highest-salaried, most soulless positions that they can find to repay debts or to the citizen service corps to erase accumulated loans. It is really rather terrifying to think that this sort of abject treatment and cornering could bloom into a great reckoning, especially compared to the nominal cost associated with university any where else in the world, and levels of private impoverishment that would challenge any soverereign debt default.
