Excellent post, and I’m glad you looped in the student loan issue. That’s the real problem.

Everyone would get a college diploma if they could afford it, it’s never going to HURT your career plans. The problem is if it is WORTH the incredible cost of it? If it leads to career that is lucrative enough to pay off that debt, then it’s worth it, but more and more it either doesn’t lead to that job, or the job it leads to doesn’t pay enough to pay off the loan. That’s just a bad investment, and we shouldn’t be encouraging and facilitating young people to get themselves into enslaving debt at the very beginning of their adult lives.

We have to start seeing runaway student loan debt as a National Security problem. We are already seeing major changes in societal structures, as more and more young, working adults live with their parents, living in a vehicle is becoming a viable housing choice, people are avoiding marriage because they don’t want to combine their student loan debt (or take on someone else’s), couples aren’t having children, they aren’t buying houses, furniture, etc. Some people are even deferring retirement because they STILL have student loan debt to pay off first.

In another time, all those people with motorized e-bikes or skateboards would have been driving cars, but the cost of even a used car is too expensive. Too bad you can’t live in it, too.

It is already starting to affect our economy, and every year we graduate another wave of Americans into a lifetime of crippling debt that will keep them from properly contributing to the economy. How many more years can we do this before there just aren’t enough people who can afford to live in this society?