When it comes to the student loan debt crisis, let’s not leave out the responsibilities of parents, many of whom are not acting like the adults in the room.
We all realize that the 18-year-old brain is emotional, irrational, and is not entirely developed, and won’t be until the age of 25.
Parents, your job is not to indulge your child’s every whim. If they sat you down tomorrow and said they wanted to become a porn star, you would probably try to talk them out of it. So when they come to you and want to sign up to be a Indentured servant for the rest of their life, why do you say yes? Allowing a child to choose a school and pay full tuition and room and board, especially for an out of state institution, is INSANE! Just Say No.
Even if you have the money saved to pay for it, don’t you think your child could benefit from a few life lessons of earning things for themselves and the amount of money you would otherwise spend on their education could be their beginning capital to really set them up for the rest of their life? Saying yes to a child’s decision, without making them responsible for the outcome is a poor use of capital, as well as poor life lessons.
I don’t’ expect all 18-year olds to understand the true cost of the debt they are taking on. Further, I don’t think it should be legal, but I’ll never be in charge, so that doesn’t matter until someone sues the government to say that them taking on loans is a violation of their constitutional rights of the pursuit of happiness. That will likely never happen, and the current gift of guarantees on student loans make them the perfect investment, but these loans are shackles for people with them. Shackles many people will die with.
However, what is apparent is there are a lot of poor decisions being made across the country by parents who are either paying way too much for tuition, or worse, allowing themselves and their children to take on massive amounts of unnecessary debt to pay for an education whose value is in questions.
Let’s turn this into a simple example of shopping for items, a piece of paper in this case. Most parents are saying yes to buying the exact same item – a piece of paper that says you attended for 4 years of schooling and did enough to convince professors and adjuncts that you learned something – but each piece of paper comes at extremely different costs. If we just said a degree is a degree, then would you like to buy that degree at convenience pricing at 7/11 for the low, low cost of $200,000, or will to buy it at Walmart for $35,000? Now the haters can begin to argue how their school is better and why, but 10 years out of college, no employer cares where you went to school and in most cases they don’t even care that you did. No one will be asking about your GPA or your test scores, which are being shown more and more to have NO CORRELATION – let that be repeated because its extremely important – NO CORRELATION – to long term success or happiness.
Now imagine a terrible, but very common scenario (which is actually happening to about 2 million students per year): Your child doesn’t finish college AND has student loan debt. They will be working for others for most of their life as their earning power will always lag behind the growing debt.
Parents, please. Do not let your young adult make decisions to chain them to debt for the rest of their life. Have the tough conversations and help your student find ways to reduce debt. Focus on the end result and figure out the way to get there with the least amount of debt. We will try to give you as much help with information so you can do the math and evaluate the value before your family makes decisions.
Young people are excitable and believe they have absolute resolution in what they want, but that also opens your family up to being taken advantage of – if you have to buy then you have no leverage in negotiation – so please be the adult in the room and just say no to massive amounts of debt.