Memo to students: you are screwed :-(

I have blogged quite a few times here that one of the biggest scams--for want of a better word--in this country is, yes, higher education.  Which is why I did not care much for Paul Krugman repeating the same old lines about the economic returns on higher education.  We are way overselling higher education.  We promise them--sometimes implicitly--that once they get a college degree, well, that they too can begin to live the high life.  This is far from the reality, and increasingly so in this highly competitive globalized economy.

Higher educational professionals do not suffer from such a sales gimmick though; in fact, they gain a lot by catering to a market demand that should not exist in the first place.  Students end up paying for it, and often through huge loans and no job after graduation.  It then becomes grandiose disillusioned :-(

In the context of a WSJ report on how the Great Recession and the credit crunch is affecting the low-income group, Mike Konczal writes:

Now we are currently asking children, 17, 18 or 19 years old, to try and assess how much of a student loan debt burden they can handle vis-a-vis their future income over their entire lives. But, especially compared to their grandparents, uncertainty is so much greater now. The consumption smoothing line invokes a world where everyone with a college degree will get a stable, solid job with certainty (and your employer will, of course, pick up the health care tab).
The person in the Wall Street Journal article almost certainly had no realistic idea for what would be awaiting her on the other side of the associate's degree, and she misjudged this terribly. And, from an efficiency point of view, it's what makes this more perverse than the indentured servitude contract - people under indentured servitude had the job waiting for them. The clock was ticking for the firms who had set up the contract, and they needed to get their value. With student loans, they can sit there for decades, never dischargeable, always getting paid regardless of recession or job market.

On my part, all I can do is keep yelling that the emperor has no clothes!