Problem 1 — Defaulting into college: The myth has grown that the norm changed in the job market from employers desiring a bachelor’s degree to a master’s degree. More often than not a master’s degree proved nothing more than growing debt pains and no change from being one of 100 resumes for entry-level mediocrity.

Systematically, the liberal arts design is failing on a financial level in which students graduate with impossibly high loans. More importantly, it’s failing on a philosophical level in which students choose a major that interests them, but doesn’t necessarily allow them to develop employable assets. The fantasyland theory of follow your heart and the money will follow has all but disappeared.

Problem 2 — Faculty’s initiative: There is clear evidence that the more time professors spend in the classroom the less they get paid. With their financial consequences being dictated by publications and not student’s success in the classroom, classes often get taught by adjunct professors or professors at the bottom in order to give their published superiors more time for research.

In essence, students are paying for well-published professors who are being paid more not to spend time in the classroom teaching them. We need a system that rewards professors who push their students and not just their publications.

Problem 3 — Cost: Maintaining the student loan interest rates will help, but it’s just a drop in the bucket for the radical changes that need to take place in higher education. Students need an affordable education that drives them into employable avenues and stops colleges from teaching irrelevance. Major league private schools are starting to show their power to take down the economy as they drag graduates into financial death that can never be escaped. Because the federal government is so conscious of college graduates in America, they made a law that prevents students from discharging their loans through bankruptcy. Uncle Sam also allows students in default to be sued indefinitely by their debt collectors. Thank you, debt-collector lobbyists.

The stupid legal assembly of student loans and higher education’s love for educating irrelevance yet still having the audacity to charge exorbitantly is putting America on the brink of a new recession. Letting American youth graduate into mountains of debt without giving them jobs is a recipe for continued economic retardation.

Samuel Draper

Canton

Thousands of readers like you have made Northern New York Newspapers the number one ranked website* for local news and sports coverage in the north country.

You can continue on to this article in a few seconds, or you can visit one of our websites:

• Watertown Daily Times
• The Ogdensburg Journal
• Daily Courier-Observer