Like the housing bubble, students have been convinced to sign up for loans and attend schools with high tuitions that they can’t afford, without fully understanding what they are getting into.
View the documentary from the 2011’s Sundance Film Festival, “Default: The Student Loan Documentary,” which aired on PBS last November below. The film follows several graduates in their struggles to pay back their loans.
Default: the Student Loan Doc (Trailer)(old) from Default: the Student Loan Docume on Vimeo.
Student borrowing past $100 Billion in 2010 and now outstanding loans exceed $1 Trillion dollars.
This means that loan payments upon graduation will be so prohibitively high that most new graduates will not be able to afford to buy cars or home, and many will have loan payments greater than their incomes.
Many of the students who are taking loans are training for jobs that will not provide them sufficient income to pay off their loans – and they don’t understand this as truth in lending laws do not apply to student loans!
This is another economic bubble waiting to burst that may damage the economy again.
For more information read the article in Common Dreams here.
Read letter by Ralph Nader and others to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan here.
Educate yourself here and here which are links to the web site: “StudentLoanJustice.org”.
Look at the Facebook web site on Default: The Student Loan Documentary film here.
Dr Linda Shelton 