I've met graduating college kids facing loan payments and a bad economy, and they are worried that they won't be able to get a job. This is not the way America needs to be.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Young people deserve stable employment opportunities and not mountains of debt. When young people can access the middle class, America is strengthened.
There's more student debt than credit card debt! Everywhere I go, I run into young people trying to build careers while they keep shelling out money on their education loans. If the economy is looking for a new generation of home-buyers, I can't imagine they'll get it from these folks.
By making college unaffordable and student loans unbearable, we risk deterring our best and brightest from pursuing higher education and securing a good-paying job.
We have lots of students graduating from our high schools, and you import the labor, then we're not giving that opportunity to our own folks.
Student loan debt is the reason I don't advise students who want to become entrepreneurs to apply to elite, expensive colleges. They can be as successful if they go to a relatively inexpensive public college.
You might say those who can't repay their student debts shouldn't have borrowed in the first place. But they had no way of knowing just how bad the jobs market would become.
Many kids come out of college, they have a credit card and a diploma. They don't know how to buy a house or a car or health insurance or life insurance. They do not know basic microeconomics.
When I talk to people, their concern is, how are you going to create jobs? How are you going to help turn this economy around? How are we going to make sure that when my kids get out of high school or college there will be some job there? Those are the concerns that are on their minds.
We need to prepare our kids for a 21st Century economy, and we're not doing it with our schools.
We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt.