Commentary: Why Having the Student Loan Interest Rate Go Up is a Good Thing (Like You REALLY wanted to hear that)

As I celebrate (or not) the 20th anniversary of my graduation from college, it is time to reflect back on the days of my own student loan problems.  Those days were not fun and times haven’t changed anything.  America is also celebrating 1 trillion dollars in student debt and this is certainly not a good thing either.  While the government is strangle-holding the interest rate on the passing of where the source of keeping the rate low has put the entire issue on the fore front of thousands of people.The real question in all this is who is to blame why this is all happening in the first place.  I like to spread the guilt around and here is my list in no particular order.

• The student – Oh yes, they can pick any school in the world to go as long as they are rich enough to afford to go there.  Debt forever is what they can expect and certainly the possibility of finding a job after graduation will be next to impossible.
• The parents – They can nowadays set up a college savings account almost from the minute to when they arrive in the world, but most parents can’t afford to fund the accounts so the college fund will end up being underfunded.  What’s worse is that many of these parents are too young to even afford to have a child (or worse children) in the first place.
• High school teachers – It would be nice that more of them would care about the student’s best interest rather than what their union wants them to do.  It used to be that teachers actually cared to some degree, but now it is a feeling of no longer caring at all.
• High school guidance counselors – I remember my high school guidance counselor gave me very poor advice and sort of created huge hole that would exist between what I would leave behind in high school and jump into at college.  Sad to say, I was not at all prepared for what I was to expect.  To help compensate for my future costs of college, my counselor set me up with the possibility of getting at least one scholarship.  In the end not only did I not get a scholarship but the students that got them was spread out only between about 5 people and most got multiple ones.  Certainly not a fair system.
• U.S. Congress – They created this mess and now they don’t really want to get out of it.  Just another proof of a do-nothing Congress.  Need I say more about them.
• College counselors – The one I had in college cared more about advancing his own career than trying to advance the students he should have been counseling.  Ironically, he left the university once and for all the same year I graduated for a job with Sun Microsystems.  He was gone for a sabbatical an entire year with them around my fourth year at the school.
• College professors – Some of these “professors” hardly knew their subject matter and instead spent more time talking about their various philosophies rather than the topics they were hired to teach.  A good example of this was the huge gap that was left between my Calculus A course teacher and my Calculus B course teacher.  They used the same book and sadly the Calculus B teacher started his semester about 50 pages after the Calculus A teacher should have ended at.  Of course, I ended up taking the course twice because of this gap and even with 2 or 3 third-party books I still really didn’t pass the course the second time either.  However, the teacher made a huge mistake by making the announcement that “everybody passed this semester which hasn’t happened in a long time”.  Not only was this not true, but he had to change my grade possibly from the chance of getting sued.  After all with so many witnesses, he would be held accountable for making a false statement about the status of his class.  Another example is the teacher that always kept the students a much shorter time than the scheduled 2 ½ hours that the class met on a Thursday night. Sadly, since this was a prerequisite to another course, I failed the follow-up course because I was not prepared for it.
• The courses themselves – I will admit that the quality of courses that I had during my years at college ranged from the dopey to the down-right impossible to pass to the obscene.  One course that I took my first year was “War and Peace in the 20th Century”.  While this course sounded interesting, it was filled with so much boring information and graphically explicit films that it would make HBO look like the Disney Channel.  It really was that bad.  In today’s politically correct world, it would certainly be better to have a rating system to what the course would contain rather than get big surprises after it was too late.  Another problem was that since many courses were prerequisites of others, it was impossible to get into some classes when wanted so this added to my extended stay with the school.  This problem in addition to the fact that many courses didn’t really lead to the course that followed.  Also, since the college required so many core courses, this took nearly 3 years to fulfill this obligation alone given the limited availability and scheduling conflicts of needed courses. 
• Work-study leaders – I never could get into a work-study program during my college years because our family income was too high to qualify for it.  So, I had to get a real job in the outside world and it was not in the field of my education.  I have a degree in Computer Science and with no job experience I became retail guru instead at 3 different companies over 20+ years.
• For-Profit schools – While I never went to one of these, its apparent that they are sometimes cheaper than state run universities, but getting a job after graduation in the chosen field is just as bad if not worse.  Many of them claim job placement, but even a job at McDonalds can be considered job placement. Therefore mission accomplished for them!!
• Your bank – So you take out the school loan at your favorite bank and they say the loan will be handled locally and that there will be no problem paying back the bank.  Then comes the big surprise!  The bank sells your loan to a third-party and you end mailing payments to them instead hoping that they get properly posted.  Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t – there was no science of when the holding company would decide to make a payment late just because they wanted to.
• Collection agencies – Call them what they really are:  arrogant lying bastards.  During the time that I was trying to pay off my loan (and still going to school by the way), the company that held my loan sold it off to another place.  Here is the kicker though:  Nobody told me who held the loan so I didn’t know where to send the payments.  So for about six months of non-payment, I received a letter from a collection agency demanding that I pay the whole entire loan in full.  I couldn’t even set up a payment plan with these people.  When I called and asked why it went into collections, they said I didn’t pay and I explained to them that I didn’t know who to send payments to.  Their response was “I still should have send payments out even if it was to the wrong company”.  Great advice for someone who has money to just throw around just for fun.  It is this type of circumstances that make people NOT wanting to pay off their student loans and believe men I 100% agree with that. 

Of course there are many others that can be blamed for the huge student loan debt.  The important thing to remember is that the student loan process is a ruthless problem later on.  I would not have even bothered going to college knowing now what I went through.  It was definitely not worth the cost or aggravation.  With today’s college costs being about 6 times greater than when I went over 20 years ago, going back to school is definitely forever out of the question.  In fact, when I have people ask me if I would recommend college to them, I would tell them that if they can afford to go without getting any student loans (or any loans at all), then go to school otherwise try and find a descent job somewhere, but not Staples though.  They hate educated people!

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