BOSTON — In the middle of an article on how a lack of student-loan debt-consolidation can dissuade people from getting married, the New York Times — probably inadvertently — highlights one of the problems with the tuition debt-bubble and the higher-education racket:
…as the couple got closer to their wedding day, she took out all the paperwork and it became clear that her total debt was actually about $170,000. “He accused me of lying,” said Ms. Eastman, 31, a San Francisco X-ray technician and part-time photographer who had run up much of the balance studying for a bachelor’s degree in photography. “But if I was lying, I was lying to myself, not to him. I didn’t really want to know the full amount.”
At a time when even people with no graduate degrees, like Ms. Eastman, often end up six figures in the hole and people getting married for the second time have loads of debt from their earlier lives, it should come as no surprise that debt can bust up engagements. Even when couples disclose their debt in detail, it poses a series of challenges. (emphasis added)
When I was the editor-in-chief of Spare Change News, a non-profit newspaper in Boston, I received many resumes from potential volunteers and freelancers who wanted either to write articles or take photos for the publication.
Out of all the freelance photographers at SCN, the best was a woman who had been formerly homeless and who survived on a week-to-week basis based on welfare and freelance gigs. She was an extremely-hard worker who merely wanted to make a living through her trade. I hired her as much as I could — for the simple reason that she was the best photographer. (If the organization had increased my budget, I would have hired her full-time.) I did not care that she did not have a college degree.
For this reason, I cannot understand how someone Eastman would have taken $170,000 in loans for a degree in photography. Wait, scratch that — I can understand. As I noted in prior posts on the college-tuition bubble and the economic effects of student loans, young people were pressured by parents and teachers to get a degree in something — and usually in a subject that interested them. And now, as Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds has pointed out, we are seeing the effects of that mentality.
I learned more about journalism from my internships and part-time jobs rather than from Boston University’s journalism classes — after all, one learns best by doing. Over time, this attitude will increase as more young people realize that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of a college degree is increasingly a waste of time and money.
But this is not to say that college has no value and should be ignored completely. There is a place for college, but it is not what you may think. More on that in a future post. Still, there are reasons other than student-loan debt for why men and women are marrying later — or even not at all.