OPINION: Student loan borrowers beware
Are the exorbitant price tags for college degrees worth it? The evidence indicates the answer is ‘No.’
You might find the Department of Education’s (DOEd) recent tweet on student loan scams ironic.
⚠️ Spot the signs of a student loan scam! ⚠️
💰 You’re asked to pay an upfront cost or monthly fees
🤨 You’re promised immediate loan forgiveness
🔑 You’re asked to provide your FSA ID password
👇 Here’s how to keep yourself safe 👇https://t.co/jZYzBsfd7R#TuesdayTips pic.twitter.com/UxpRSErBhY— U.S. Department of Education (@usedgov) March 14, 2023
Testimonies, economic data, and educational attainment data show that the DOEd’s student loan regime itself appears to be a scam.
Of the 43.5 million student loan borrowers making up the $1.76 trillion student loan deficit, half owe more than $20,000 after graduating with just a bachelor’s degree.
Compare that, however, to the average student loan debt amount of graduates in 1975, four years before the DOEd was founded: $5,050 in 2023 numbers.
But averages do not fully capture the grim picture of students with substantially more debt.
Take the students interviewed in a 2019 CNBC documentary, for example:
One student with a debt of $350,000 said she would be nearly 40 years old before she pays off her loan.
The financial outlook of borrowers is even starker for those living in areas known for their high cost. Take New York City.
New York University’s (NYU) tuition is a staggering $17,352 per semester, amounting to nearly $140,000 after four years of schooling.
As of Mar. 22, 2023, however, “the average annual pay for a College Grad in New York City is $41,133 a year.” With such a low salary, only a small amount of one’s earnings could go towards the loan, potentially resulting in decades of payments.
In fact, even if an NYU graduate made the average payment of $393 per month, he or she could see three decades of payments.
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As noted in the testimonies of borrowers interviewed by CNBC, students are making the decision to take out loans based on the assumption that it will improve future earnings.
But that assumption, sadly, does not hold. Even those who borrowed for professional degrees are being scammed by the student loan regime.
According to Education Data Initiative (EDI), “[t]he average medical school debt is $202,450, excluding premedical undergraduate and other educational debt,” but the average salary of a physician is just $52,271.
Before the DOEd’s founding in 1979, medical school graduates had better prospects.
Their average debt was $64,400 adjusted for inflation with an inflation-adjusted salary of $92,930.
But borrowers today are not only taking on more debt and earning less than former generations, they’re also learning a lot less in college than former generations.
From 2006 to 2018, average IQs among young people declined.
That data comes from a study published in the 2023 edition of Intelligence, which revealed that four-year degrees had less of an impact on the IQ declines of younger generations than older generations, suggesting that higher education was more beneficial for older Americans.
General cognitive decline may be affected, in part, by soft curriculum standards and leftist political weaponization of curricula.
In their 2011 study, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, authors of the book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” found that 32% of college students “did not take any courses with more than 40 pages of reading per week and 50% did not take a single course in which they wrote more than 20 pages over the course of the semester.”
Rigor became even less important as the 21st century continued.
Professors Philip Babcock of the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks of the University of California Riverside, found in a November 2022 study that today’s students “hit the books for just 14 hours” a week compared to 24 hours in 1961, as previously reported.
Additionally, many professors have oriented their instruction around parroting leftist political orthodoxy, rather than engaging in an open-ended inquiry for the truth.
For instance, in late 2020, a Northwest Missouri State University’s Humanities and Social Sciences Department Chair Dawn Gilley alleged that Western Civilization is connected to white supremacy.
“[W]estern civilization is coded language for white supremacy,” she said, quoting an unknown alleged scholar.
Gilley also told students that Adolf Hitler embodied “Western Civilization because of his commitment to ‘racial purity.’”
Beyond erroneous historical or philosophical claims, professors are even toying with topics like biological sex.
Anthropologist Professor Gabby Yearwood from the University of Pittsburgh (UPitt), for example, recently claimed that men and women have indistinguishable bone structures, flaunting his PhD as the reason he should be believed.
Video of the claim was posted to Twitter:
.@Riley_Gaines_ to anthropologist: “If you were to dig up… 2 humans… 100 years from now, both man and woman, could you tell the difference, strictly off of bones?”
”No.”
*CHAOS*
”I’m not sure why I’m being laughed at if I’m the expert in the room. ... I have a PhD!” pic.twitter.com/YYW76ISevI— Vince Coglianese (@VinceCoglianese) March 30, 2023
If college costs more, but earnings are less and the education is worse, the question then becomes: Are the exorbitant price tags for college degrees worth it? The evidence indicates the answer is ‘No.’
[RELATED: PROF. GIORDANO: Community college is a better, more viable alternative for many students]
But many borrowers will continue to pay that price because they believe in the false promise that higher education will lead to better economic outcomes.
The DOEd is right to warn borrowers of scams, but when returns on education are not lucrative, even in terms of mental acuity, the idea of borrowing for a degree feels like a scam itself. To protect more borrowers, the DOEd should also warn against taking out loans altogether and challenge borrowers to consider the returns on their educational investments.
Borrowers should also not assume that just because the cost of attending college is expensive it means that it is valuable.
Follow Jared Gould on Twitter
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Editorials and op-eds reflect the opinion of the authors and not necessarily that of Campus Reform or the Leadership Institute.
