The share of borrowers who default on their student loans is bigger than the federal government’s short-term data suggest, with thousands more facing damaged credit histories and millions more tax dollars being lost in the long run.
According to unpublished data obtained by The Chronicle, one in every five government loans that entered repayment in 1995 has gone into default. The default rate is higher for loans made to students from two-year colleges, and higher still, reaching 40 percent, for those who attended for-profit institutions.
The numbers represent thousands of students like Lourdes Samedy, of Boston, who ended up defaulting on about $7,000 in student loans after completing a nine-month-long medical-assistant program at Corinthian Colleges Inc. Everest College, and now cannot get a job.
I won’t go into why this matters to me. Suffice it to say, college is highly overrated. And I will never allow my children to take out a pennies worth of debt to finance their education. We have lied to generations of children about how smart they are, and more importantly, how smart people make lots of money. Hard working folks make money, and it doesn’t much matter how much learning they’ve got. We’ve got more college educated people than college educated jobs. So, ask your Starbucks barrista to tell you about comparative literature while you wait. I know it’s cliche, but grandma said don’t buy what you can’t pay for. And that goes double for school.