Angry Graduate Wrote This Letter To His University. It's Hard Not To Agree With Him.

[Shoonra]

165. True beyond words

We just spent four years fighting tooth and nail for affordable health insurance .... but we still don't have affordable education! Since it is now widely acknowledged that a college education is almost a necessity for a desirable career - and for the nation's progress - you'd think someone would care enough to make it more, not less, available, especially to those demographic groups who have, in previous generations, found the academic doors shut to them.

Not so. The colleges which used to discriminate on the basis of race now discriminate on the basis of wealth, which is not terribly different. And graduates who weren't born wealthy leave school with unspeakable financial burdens that effectively keep them as financially thin as if they didn't go to college and stuck to waiting tables and flipping burgers. This is particularly mean because the debt is owed to the government - so it cannot be discharged by bankruptcy, although it may make bankruptcy necessary to avoid being crushed by all of life's other debts.

Nobody thought about the effect on the economy of such a massive debt being borne by such a huge segment of the population. Just as nobody thought about the effect of unregulated stock investing prior to 1929.