Wednesday, February 01, 2006
DEBT - AND YOUTH
There is a long article at BusinessWeek Online titled "Thirty and Broke: The Real Price of a College Education Today", by Susan Berfield. It begins:
Paige Nichols has a certain stoicism about her, which has helped her overcome disappointments big and small. She was born in Oklahoma City in 1975, a time of plenty for her family. Her father was prospering as a commodities trader, and he liked to spend his money. Paige would turn out to be the same way. But by the time she entered college in 1993, their financial situation had become, she says, considerably more "volatile." Her parents had been able to pay for the education of her two sisters, 11 and 13 years older than she, but told Paige they couldn't do the same for her.
She finished up at the University of Tulsa in 1997 with a business degree and $20,000 in student loans, which makes her, by official reckoning anyway, a typical graduate. She is now paying off her loans, $300 a month; at that rate it will take her until she's about 50. "Twenty thousand isn't even that much, but it feels hefty," she says. "I'm not making any headway."
Like many who emerged from adolescence amid the promise of the late 1990s, Paige never imagined that money would be the issue upon which crucial decisions in her life would turn. But it is. She has been fascinated with forensic psychology ever since reading a book in college about a woman who studied serial killers, and she was accepted into a master's degree program at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology in 2004. Before long she reconsidered. "I dream big," she says, "then reality seeps in." Paige would have had to borrow at least $32,000, which seemed like "way too much to think about," especially since afterward she might earn less than she would in the corporate world. "I could not justify putting myself in that financial jeopardy," she says. "But it could have been my life's passion."
Continue reading...
This is hardly unusual. When I was in college, young people could still pay for their education by working over the summer and taking a small student loan at very low interest that was easily paid off. Then there was a time when mom went back to work to pay for the kids college education. Today both are unrealistic. Today the kids pay for their own by borrowing money, which means that they begin their life in debt. The alternative of not going to college means they will suffer from a precarious (and low-paying) job situation for their entire life. The debt means postponing marriage and children or taking a big financial risk.
Colleges have taken note of the reality. Today in state schools the policy is "retention." Keep 'em in school by giving grades that haven't been earned and watering down the curriculum. The alternative is empty classrooms and lowered income in the treasrer's office, which could signal the closing of the school.
"Dumbing down" has reached into the realm of the bachelor's degree, making additional education essential if job security is to be sought. With it comes increased educational debt.
I know of a young couple in their late 20s/early 30s who have an education debt, with the husband working in a job he dislikes intensely while his wife finishes her doctorate. He has only a bachelor's degree and would like to go back to school. If he moves to get a better job, she will either have to stay behind to finish her degree or move with him and abandon hope of finishing. She wants to have children and is faced with a medical condition that makes doing it now necessary. The pressure is tearing their marriage apart. How does anyone counsel a situation like this?
I know of another couple in their 30s who have recently had their first child. She is in the last stages of finishing her doctorate. He has just begun his. Their education debt is over $100,000.
This is what we do to our children. I can still remember a time when debt--any kind of debt--was embarrassing. That was the thinking of small town America in the 1950s. It almost sounds like another world, doesn't it? People didn't even go into debt to buy a house if there was any way they could arrange not to. If they did assume a mortgage, the number one priority was paying it off, and sometimes mom went to work to get the money to do that.
Today our young people never know the freedom of not owing someone money, and the luxury of a mother staying at home to raise the kids is vanishing. In the face of this economic reality, the Catholic prohibition against birth control seems at the very least to be unrealistic.
If a universal Catholic acceptance of large families and no birth control is ever going to become possible, these economic ralities will have to be addressed. Until they are, the birth control issue will still divide the Catholic world.
