By Edwin Dearborn

Brand Strategist | Business Coach | Author | Keynote Speaker

"Son, you need to go to college and earn a degree so that you have something to fall back on." This was refrain I grew up hearing from my father who did not graduate from college. Moreover, my father earned double the national average his entire life.

What debunks this logic even further is that I am commonly served coffee from my baristas who are not only are college degree holders, but are continuing to chase the paper dream, working diligently to earn that higher degree. The logic being, "Well, I simply do not have enough degrees to be valuable in this economy."

This is not only a fallacy, but an insidious trap that is burdening future generations in massive debt. Estimates are that college debt is now at 1 trillion dollars, a larger amount as to what Americans owe on credit cards.

About 90% of that debt is owed to the Federal Government and defaulting through bankruptcy is not an option. What most of these graduates are "falling back on" is massive debt that is disallowing them the access to goods and services, while pretentiously bolstering their ego that they posses the tools to actually make it in life.

Student Debt Is a National Crisis

I think the student loan bubble is going to burst." - Mark Cuban

According to a new study by a pair of Federal Reserve Board economists, this is a national crisis. Student loans, the study argues, may be a big reason so many young adults are moving in with Mom and Dad. But the bad economy? Not so much.

Between 2005–2014, Lisa Dettling and Joanne Hsu write, the percentage of 18-to-31-year-olds living with their parents grew at an “unprecedented” speed, hitting a high of about 36 percent. Using credit agency data on more than 1.8 million young adults, they look at how changes in indebtedness and the economy writ large affected the rate at which the kids moved in with their parents. During this period, student loan burdens skyrocketed, while other types of debt shrunk back a bit. Meanwhile, we all know what happened to the unemployment rate.

The Coming Meltdown

Remember the housing meltdown ? Tough to forget isn’t it. The formula for the housing boom and bust was simple. A lot of easy money being lent to buyers who couldn’t afford the money they were borrowing. That money was then spent on homes with the expectation that the price of the home would go up and it could easily be flipped or refinanced at a profit. Who cares if you couldn’t afford the loan. As long as prices kept on going up, everyone was happy. And prices kept on going up. And as long as pricing kept on going up real estate agents kept on selling homes and finding money for buyers.

The President has introduced programs that try to reward schools that don’t raise tuition and costs. They won’t work. Right now there is a never ending supply of buyers. Students who can’t get jobs or who think that by going to college they enhance their chances to get a job. Its the collegiate equivalent of flipping houses. You borrow as much money as you can for the best school you can get into and afford and then you “flip” that education for the great job you are going to get when you graduate.

Except those great jobs aren’t always there. I don’t think any college kid took on tens of thousands of dollars in debt with the expectation they would get a job working for minimum wage against tip

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Education should be about enriching an individual's future, not shackling them with decades of oppressive debt.

Source- Linked In