Student loan crisis a guidance problem
Forget about the amount of debt the average Class of 2017 student has. The student loan crisis is really a guidance problem. The clue to that startling fact is found in data cited by Ben Miller in a New York Times commentary (“The student debt problem is worse than we imagined,” Aug. 26). Citing federal data about class of 2012 college students he points out “Five years into repayment, 44 percent of borrowers at (private for-profit) schools faced some type of loan distress, including 25 percent who defaulted.” In contrast, private nonprofit schools had default rates of just 8.5 percent, about a third of the for-profit schools while students who graduated from public colleges had a default rate of 13.5 percent.
Solving the real student debt problem may entail direct grants such as Pell Grants as Miller and many other economists claim, but these direct subsidies by themselves will never mitigate the problem that students are not rational consumers of education. Without proper guidance while in high school, students will enroll in expensive colleges that are of dubious quality, they will delay choosing their majors in college while running up school debt, and eventually, perhaps, they will go to graduate school in fields that pay too little and acquire still more debt, sometimes amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Though no one seems to be calling for these steps, the answer to the school debt crisis lies in providing adequate high school guidance services, especially in school districts with high proportions of lower income students. Back-end subsidies for filling public interest professional positions would also go a long way to solving the student debt problem. It is time Congress and the states began looking at these options as well as Pell Grants and lower interest payments on debt.
robert Leslie Fisher
Delmar