Today the CBC had an article about what student debt loads are doing to graduates. It was the story of a woman in her mid-twenties who is having her wages garnished to pay for a student debt that, years after graduation, she has only managed to pay back 4% of. Her remaining debt is over 80% of her annual salary.
Naturally the comments on this story were people talking about how they paid off their debt without a problem and saying that if this woman picked an education that wasn't going to lead to a good job then she deserves what she gets.
But it isn't really what she gets, it is what all of us get. We get a generation that won't buy property, may not even rent property because they can't afford to live anywhere but with their parents. They won't buy cars - and we lament our struggling auto sector. They will indefinitely postpone having kids for fear that they will still be paying down their own student debts when their children get to university.
Of course its not the whole generation, just maybe 10-15%. We sacrifice 10% of the productive capacity of the next generation to the banks for interest payments. And our payment for that is the illusion that if we are successful it is because we deserve to be. Sweet deal.
i dunno. i paid off my student loans lickety-split.
ReplyDeleteoh, wait. my mom inherited some money and paid them off for me.
but doesn't that qualify me to sit back and snark at people trying to better their circumstances through education?
i feel we should be blaming poverty on the poor because goodness knows, the only people who are poor are poor because they don;t believe in themselves, or the rightness of exploitation..
and what are you doing with a computer anyway? don;t you know that only rich people can justifiably have a computer or a car or a home? the rest of you, get back to work!