[eavesdropper]

[quote=patb]http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2011-06-03-fewer-children-census-suburbs_n.htm

if birthrates continue to decline, will that put long term pressure on housing?
Families without children or with a single child will prefer condos and townhouses.[/quote]

patb, I don’t think the reduced “family” size will be an issue, so far as housing is concerned. I’m a mid-to-late baby boomer, and here are my observations of housing trends over the 20th century:

My grandparents’ generation (7 to 10 kids) lived in one- or two-room apartments, or a small (800 to 1000 sf) house, often shared with several members of an extended family.

My parents’ generation (3 to 7 kids) moved into little (1000 to 1200 sf) suburban ranchers and split levels in the thousands of postwar “Levittowns” that sprang up all over America.

Early Boomers (2 to 4 kids) decided that an extra room (i.e., the family room) was needed to actually “live in”, and moved on up into 1600 to 2100 sf domiciles.

Late Boomers determined that each child MUST have their own room, so mortgages were stretched to cover 2200 to 3000 sf.

Somewhere in there, the McMansion was born, and middle-class families with a couple offspring were trying to fill 4500 to 6000 sf and more with rooms for every possible activity (home theater, craft room, gift wrapping room). The foyers in most of these homes are larger than the entire house in which my parents raised five kids.

So I’m guessing that the next housing evolution will be 10,000 to 12,000 sf estates for singles or childless couples (perhaps one very small child would be acceptable).

In all seriousness, patb, energy prices are going to guide the location of neighborhoods and the size of houses. Commuting costs will increase to the point that people will have to move closer to the cities, and the lack of open space will curtail their ability to express themselves in brick, mortar, and aluminum siding. The upside to this is a reversal of the trend of developers to move into beautiful pristine rural areas, and turn them into even more hideous faceless overcrowded exurbs.

[eavesdropper]

[quote=patb]http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2011-06-03-fewer-children-census-suburbs_n.htm

if birthrates continue to decline, will that put long term pressure on housing?
Families without children or with a single child will prefer condos and townhouses.[/quote]

patb, I don’t think the reduced “family” size will be an issue, so far as housing is concerned. I’m a mid-to-late baby boomer, and here are my observations of housing trends over the 20th century:

My grandparents’ generation (7 to 10 kids) lived in one- or two-room apartments, or a small (800 to 1000 sf) house, often shared with several members of an extended family.

My parents’ generation (3 to 7 kids) moved into little (1000 to 1200 sf) suburban ranchers and split levels in the thousands of postwar “Levittowns” that sprang up all over America.

Early Boomers (2 to 4 kids) decided that an extra room (i.e., the family room) was needed to actually “live in”, and moved on up into 1600 to 2100 sf domiciles.

Late Boomers determined that each child MUST have their own room, so mortgages were stretched to cover 2200 to 3000 sf.

Somewhere in there, the McMansion was born, and middle-class families with a couple offspring were trying to fill 4500 to 6000 sf and more with rooms for every possible activity (home theater, craft room, gift wrapping room). The foyers in most of these homes are larger than the entire house in which my parents raised five kids.

So I’m guessing that the next housing evolution will be 10,000 to 12,000 sf estates for singles or childless couples (perhaps one very small child would be acceptable).

In all seriousness, patb, energy prices are going to guide the location of neighborhoods and the size of houses. Commuting costs will increase to the point that people will have to move closer to the cities, and the lack of open space will curtail their ability to express themselves in brick, mortar, and aluminum siding. The upside to this is a reversal of the trend of developers to move into beautiful pristine rural areas, and turn them into even more hideous faceless overcrowded exurbs.

[eavesdropper]

[quote=bearishgurl][quote=eavesdropper]…Very often the parents have also put themselves at extreme risk by remortgaging their homes to the point of foreclosure, depleting their retirement savings, and maxing out a dozen credit cards to deal with their child’s demands and financial screw-ups…[/quote]

Great post, eavesdropper. As to the above, I’ve seen a LOT of this in recent years, done mostly for “children” (aged 30-40) and their children (grandchildren of near-retirees). These “codependent” parents have virtually, in some cases, rendered themselves near-destitute in their looming retirement years financially “helping” their able-bodied adult children. After being widowed w/o life insurance, divorced one or more times or never-married with multiple children, these “adult children” move back to their parent(s) home or even live in an RV or small granny flat on their parent(s) property, using their (often “better”) address for school attendance purposes and using the parents home for laundry, cooking, hot showers, cable TV purposes, etc. The returning kid (now parent) typically comes “back home” with no job, no assets, expensive cell phone contracts for they and their child(ren), maxed out CC’s, car payments and sometimes even student loans they have deferred into oblivion……….[/quote]

BG, there’s no shortage of horror stories like this, are there? I have to admit: when I encounter them, I’m careful to show empathy to the parent, and provide such resources as I’m able. But I’m careful not to give advice (yeah, I’m being a chickenshit) because they don’t take it as such. It’s taken more as a criticism of how they raised their kid, or a criticism of the kid in general, even though I’m very careful not to go there at all. I’ve realized that most of them don’t want advice. They want a solution to magically appear and make the situation resolve itself. And miracles are the one thing I’ve never been able to master.

I do confess to seriously wanting to deck some of these adult kids though. I mean, I really want to ….badly. Especially when I look at THEIR kids. It’s all such a waste. And it doesn’t bode well for our future as a nation. I keep hearing a lot of tough talk from people about “kicking ass” and “taking care of business”, and it’s hard not to laugh when you’ve just heard their mom complain that they can’t be bothered to pick up their dirty laundry from her living room floor.

[eavesdropper]

[quote=bearishgurl][quote=eavesdropper]…Very often the parents have also put themselves at extreme risk by remortgaging their homes to the point of foreclosure, depleting their retirement savings, and maxing out a dozen credit cards to deal with their child’s demands and financial screw-ups…[/quote]

Great post, eavesdropper. As to the above, I’ve seen a LOT of this in recent years, done mostly for “children” (aged 30-40) and their children (grandchildren of near-retirees). These “codependent” parents have virtually, in some cases, rendered themselves near-destitute in their looming retirement years financially “helping” their able-bodied adult children. After being widowed w/o life insurance, divorced one or more times or never-married with multiple children, these “adult children” move back to their parent(s) home or even live in an RV or small granny flat on their parent(s) property, using their (often “better”) address for school attendance purposes and using the parents home for laundry, cooking, hot showers, cable TV purposes, etc. The returning kid (now parent) typically comes “back home” with no job, no assets, expensive cell phone contracts for they and their child(ren), maxed out CC’s, car payments and sometimes even student loans they have deferred into oblivion……….[/quote]

BG, there’s no shortage of horror stories like this, are there? I have to admit: when I encounter them, I’m careful to show empathy to the parent, and provide such resources as I’m able. But I’m careful not to give advice (yeah, I’m being a chickenshit) because they don’t take it as such. It’s taken more as a criticism of how they raised their kid, or a criticism of the kid in general, even though I’m very careful not to go there at all. I’ve realized that most of them don’t want advice. They want a solution to magically appear and make the situation resolve itself. And miracles are the one thing I’ve never been able to master.

I do confess to seriously wanting to deck some of these adult kids though. I mean, I really want to ….badly. Especially when I look at THEIR kids. It’s all such a waste. And it doesn’t bode well for our future as a nation. I keep hearing a lot of tough talk from people about “kicking ass” and “taking care of business”, and it’s hard not to laugh when you’ve just heard their mom complain that they can’t be bothered to pick up their dirty laundry from her living room floor.

[eavesdropper]

[quote=bearishgurl][quote=eavesdropper]…Very often the parents have also put themselves at extreme risk by remortgaging their homes to the point of foreclosure, depleting their retirement savings, and maxing out a dozen credit cards to deal with their child’s demands and financial screw-ups…[/quote]

Great post, eavesdropper. As to the above, I’ve seen a LOT of this in recent years, done mostly for “children” (aged 30-40) and their children (grandchildren of near-retirees). These “codependent” parents have virtually, in some cases, rendered themselves near-destitute in their looming retirement years financially “helping” their able-bodied adult children. After being widowed w/o life insurance, divorced one or more times or never-married with multiple children, these “adult children” move back to their parent(s) home or even live in an RV or small granny flat on their parent(s) property, using their (often “better”) address for school attendance purposes and using the parents home for laundry, cooking, hot showers, cable TV purposes, etc. The returning kid (now parent) typically comes “back home” with no job, no assets, expensive cell phone contracts for they and their child(ren), maxed out CC’s, car payments and sometimes even student loans they have deferred into oblivion……….[/quote]

BG, there’s no shortage of horror stories like this, are there? I have to admit: when I encounter them, I’m careful to show empathy to the parent, and provide such resources as I’m able. But I’m careful not to give advice (yeah, I’m being a chickenshit) because they don’t take it as such. It’s taken more as a criticism of how they raised their kid, or a criticism of the kid in general, even though I’m very careful not to go there at all. I’ve realized that most of them don’t want advice. They want a solution to magically appear and make the situation resolve itself. And miracles are the one thing I’ve never been able to master.

I do confess to seriously wanting to deck some of these adult kids though. I mean, I really want to ….badly. Especially when I look at THEIR kids. It’s all such a waste. And it doesn’t bode well for our future as a nation. I keep hearing a lot of tough talk from people about “kicking ass” and “taking care of business”, and it’s hard not to laugh when you’ve just heard their mom complain that they can’t be bothered to pick up their dirty laundry from her living room floor.

[eavesdropper]

[quote=bearishgurl][quote=eavesdropper]…Very often the parents have also put themselves at extreme risk by remortgaging their homes to the point of foreclosure, depleting their retirement savings, and maxing out a dozen credit cards to deal with their child’s demands and financial screw-ups…[/quote]

Great post, eavesdropper. As to the above, I’ve seen a LOT of this in recent years, done mostly for “children” (aged 30-40) and their children (grandchildren of near-retirees). These “codependent” parents have virtually, in some cases, rendered themselves near-destitute in their looming retirement years financially “helping” their able-bodied adult children. After being widowed w/o life insurance, divorced one or more times or never-married with multiple children, these “adult children” move back to their parent(s) home or even live in an RV or small granny flat on their parent(s) property, using their (often “better”) address for school attendance purposes and using the parents home for laundry, cooking, hot showers, cable TV purposes, etc. The returning kid (now parent) typically comes “back home” with no job, no assets, expensive cell phone contracts for they and their child(ren), maxed out CC’s, car payments and sometimes even student loans they have deferred into oblivion……….[/quote]

BG, there’s no shortage of horror stories like this, are there? I have to admit: when I encounter them, I’m careful to show empathy to the parent, and provide such resources as I’m able. But I’m careful not to give advice (yeah, I’m being a chickenshit) because they don’t take it as such. It’s taken more as a criticism of how they raised their kid, or a criticism of the kid in general, even though I’m very careful not to go there at all. I’ve realized that most of them don’t want advice. They want a solution to magically appear and make the situation resolve itself. And miracles are the one thing I’ve never been able to master.

I do confess to seriously wanting to deck some of these adult kids though. I mean, I really want to ….badly. Especially when I look at THEIR kids. It’s all such a waste. And it doesn’t bode well for our future as a nation. I keep hearing a lot of tough talk from people about “kicking ass” and “taking care of business”, and it’s hard not to laugh when you’ve just heard their mom complain that they can’t be bothered to pick up their dirty laundry from her living room floor.

[eavesdropper]

[quote=bearishgurl][quote=eavesdropper]…Very often the parents have also put themselves at extreme risk by remortgaging their homes to the point of foreclosure, depleting their retirement savings, and maxing out a dozen credit cards to deal with their child’s demands and financial screw-ups…[/quote]

Great post, eavesdropper. As to the above, I’ve seen a LOT of this in recent years, done mostly for “children” (aged 30-40) and their children (grandchildren of near-retirees). These “codependent” parents have virtually, in some cases, rendered themselves near-destitute in their looming retirement years financially “helping” their able-bodied adult children. After being widowed w/o life insurance, divorced one or more times or never-married with multiple children, these “adult children” move back to their parent(s) home or even live in an RV or small granny flat on their parent(s) property, using their (often “better”) address for school attendance purposes and using the parents home for laundry, cooking, hot showers, cable TV purposes, etc. The returning kid (now parent) typically comes “back home” with no job, no assets, expensive cell phone contracts for they and their child(ren), maxed out CC’s, car payments and sometimes even student loans they have deferred into oblivion……….[/quote]

BG, there’s no shortage of horror stories like this, are there? I have to admit: when I encounter them, I’m careful to show empathy to the parent, and provide such resources as I’m able. But I’m careful not to give advice (yeah, I’m being a chickenshit) because they don’t take it as such. It’s taken more as a criticism of how they raised their kid, or a criticism of the kid in general, even though I’m very careful not to go there at all. I’ve realized that most of them don’t want advice. They want a solution to magically appear and make the situation resolve itself. And miracles are the one thing I’ve never been able to master.

I do confess to seriously wanting to deck some of these adult kids though. I mean, I really want to ….badly. Especially when I look at THEIR kids. It’s all such a waste. And it doesn’t bode well for our future as a nation. I keep hearing a lot of tough talk from people about “kicking ass” and “taking care of business”, and it’s hard not to laugh when you’ve just heard their mom complain that they can’t be bothered to pick up their dirty laundry from her living room floor.

[eavesdropper]

[quote=AN]Ladies, I totally agree that if the child is abusive and the parents are affraid for their safety, the parents should kick the kids out of the house. On the other hand, if child are deadbeats and the parents are enabling that, the blame goes as much to the enabler as the deadbeat. If I screwed up as a parent and my children become deadbeat, then it’s my responsibility as a parent to fix that problem. [/quote]

This has been pointed out in several of the posts…in fact, I think the blame goes more to the enabler. A child (even an adult one) cannot act any differently than the way he’s been taught. If he/she has never been taught basic life skills or made to bear personal responsibility for wrongdoing (in essence, been taught that mom and dad are their personal servants, and they can do anything they want without personal repercussions), how can they be expected to act otherwise?

However, this begs the question: If you have realized that you’ve made serious mistakes and made genuine efforts to undo the damage your “parenting” (or lack thereof) has done, are you “helping” them by allowing them to continue using and abusing you, or simply continuing to enable their escalating deviant behavior?

[quote=AN] I’m of the mind that family who stick together and help each other will be better off than those who thinks everyone for themselves. My parents did everything they could for me (pay for my tuition, let me live at home for as long as I want, etc), and in return, now that I’m independent, I will be there to support them anytime they need/want me to. They would never have kick me out of the house and I will never put them in a home when it’s time for me to take care of my parents in return. I’m doing the same thing to my kids as my parents did to me. Just because my parents paid everything for me doesn’t make me lazy and a deadbeat. I help out around the house when I was little and start working when I was 15 and never stopped working since. But because they helped me out financially, it sure made my life a lot easier. I don’t have to worry about student loans. I can save a lot more than I would have if I have a pile of student loans to worry about. I will take that advantage my parents gave me to take it to the next level and pass on that advantage to my kids.[/quote]

This is the point that I have been trying to make: Your family **helps each other**. From your description, you and your parents have a mutually beneficial relationship, a true parent-child relationship. This does not exist in the “deadbeat” adult children we talk about here: they exist in relationships from which they, alone, benefit. They’re not grateful for their parents’ assistance and financial help because they don’t think of it as anything exceptional; they consider it their due, and that it is their parents’ responsibility to take complete care of them, and bail them out of whatever problem situation they manage to get themselves into.

And, yes, it usually results from the parents being enablers. It’s not a problem for the parents when the child is 12 because this is the socially-acceptable role for the parents at that stage of life. But when the child is 28 or 35 or 42, the parents are uncomfortable with the social role of complete caretaker. What’s more is that the stakes are higher with an adult child: the trouble they get into tends to be on a much greater scale, so it can have a much greater impact on the parents, physically, mentally, financially, emotionally. No matter what, eventually a time will come where the enabling parent will no longer feel good in that role. Yet they don’t know how to extricate themselves from it.

[eavesdropper]

[quote=AN]Ladies, I totally agree that if the child is abusive and the parents are affraid for their safety, the parents should kick the kids out of the house. On the other hand, if child are deadbeats and the parents are enabling that, the blame goes as much to the enabler as the deadbeat. If I screwed up as a parent and my children become deadbeat, then it’s my responsibility as a parent to fix that problem. [/quote]

This has been pointed out in several of the posts…in fact, I think the blame goes more to the enabler. A child (even an adult one) cannot act any differently than the way he’s been taught. If he/she has never been taught basic life skills or made to bear personal responsibility for wrongdoing (in essence, been taught that mom and dad are their personal servants, and they can do anything they want without personal repercussions), how can they be expected to act otherwise?

However, this begs the question: If you have realized that you’ve made serious mistakes and made genuine efforts to undo the damage your “parenting” (or lack thereof) has done, are you “helping” them by allowing them to continue using and abusing you, or simply continuing to enable their escalating deviant behavior?

[quote=AN] I’m of the mind that family who stick together and help each other will be better off than those who thinks everyone for themselves. My parents did everything they could for me (pay for my tuition, let me live at home for as long as I want, etc), and in return, now that I’m independent, I will be there to support them anytime they need/want me to. They would never have kick me out of the house and I will never put them in a home when it’s time for me to take care of my parents in return. I’m doing the same thing to my kids as my parents did to me. Just because my parents paid everything for me doesn’t make me lazy and a deadbeat. I help out around the house when I was little and start working when I was 15 and never stopped working since. But because they helped me out financially, it sure made my life a lot easier. I don’t have to worry about student loans. I can save a lot more than I would have if I have a pile of student loans to worry about. I will take that advantage my parents gave me to take it to the next level and pass on that advantage to my kids.[/quote]

This is the point that I have been trying to make: Your family **helps each other**. From your description, you and your parents have a mutually beneficial relationship, a true parent-child relationship. This does not exist in the “deadbeat” adult children we talk about here: they exist in relationships from which they, alone, benefit. They’re not grateful for their parents’ assistance and financial help because they don’t think of it as anything exceptional; they consider it their due, and that it is their parents’ responsibility to take complete care of them, and bail them out of whatever problem situation they manage to get themselves into.

And, yes, it usually results from the parents being enablers. It’s not a problem for the parents when the child is 12 because this is the socially-acceptable role for the parents at that stage of life. But when the child is 28 or 35 or 42, the parents are uncomfortable with the social role of complete caretaker. What’s more is that the stakes are higher with an adult child: the trouble they get into tends to be on a much greater scale, so it can have a much greater impact on the parents, physically, mentally, financially, emotionally. No matter what, eventually a time will come where the enabling parent will no longer feel good in that role. Yet they don’t know how to extricate themselves from it.

[eavesdropper]

[quote=AN]Ladies, I totally agree that if the child is abusive and the parents are affraid for their safety, the parents should kick the kids out of the house. On the other hand, if child are deadbeats and the parents are enabling that, the blame goes as much to the enabler as the deadbeat. If I screwed up as a parent and my children become deadbeat, then it’s my responsibility as a parent to fix that problem. [/quote]

This has been pointed out in several of the posts…in fact, I think the blame goes more to the enabler. A child (even an adult one) cannot act any differently than the way he’s been taught. If he/she has never been taught basic life skills or made to bear personal responsibility for wrongdoing (in essence, been taught that mom and dad are their personal servants, and they can do anything they want without personal repercussions), how can they be expected to act otherwise?

However, this begs the question: If you have realized that you’ve made serious mistakes and made genuine efforts to undo the damage your “parenting” (or lack thereof) has done, are you “helping” them by allowing them to continue using and abusing you, or simply continuing to enable their escalating deviant behavior?

[quote=AN] I’m of the mind that family who stick together and help each other will be better off than those who thinks everyone for themselves. My parents did everything they could for me (pay for my tuition, let me live at home for as long as I want, etc), and in return, now that I’m independent, I will be there to support them anytime they need/want me to. They would never have kick me out of the house and I will never put them in a home when it’s time for me to take care of my parents in return. I’m doing the same thing to my kids as my parents did to me. Just because my parents paid everything for me doesn’t make me lazy and a deadbeat. I help out around the house when I was little and start working when I was 15 and never stopped working since. But because they helped me out financially, it sure made my life a lot easier. I don’t have to worry about student loans. I can save a lot more than I would have if I have a pile of student loans to worry about. I will take that advantage my parents gave me to take it to the next level and pass on that advantage to my kids.[/quote]

This is the point that I have been trying to make: Your family **helps each other**. From your description, you and your parents have a mutually beneficial relationship, a true parent-child relationship. This does not exist in the “deadbeat” adult children we talk about here: they exist in relationships from which they, alone, benefit. They’re not grateful for their parents’ assistance and financial help because they don’t think of it as anything exceptional; they consider it their due, and that it is their parents’ responsibility to take complete care of them, and bail them out of whatever problem situation they manage to get themselves into.

And, yes, it usually results from the parents being enablers. It’s not a problem for the parents when the child is 12 because this is the socially-acceptable role for the parents at that stage of life. But when the child is 28 or 35 or 42, the parents are uncomfortable with the social role of complete caretaker. What’s more is that the stakes are higher with an adult child: the trouble they get into tends to be on a much greater scale, so it can have a much greater impact on the parents, physically, mentally, financially, emotionally. No matter what, eventually a time will come where the enabling parent will no longer feel good in that role. Yet they don’t know how to extricate themselves from it.

[eavesdropper]

[quote=AN]Ladies, I totally agree that if the child is abusive and the parents are affraid for their safety, the parents should kick the kids out of the house. On the other hand, if child are deadbeats and the parents are enabling that, the blame goes as much to the enabler as the deadbeat. If I screwed up as a parent and my children become deadbeat, then it’s my responsibility as a parent to fix that problem. [/quote]

This has been pointed out in several of the posts…in fact, I think the blame goes more to the enabler. A child (even an adult one) cannot act any differently than the way he’s been taught. If he/she has never been taught basic life skills or made to bear personal responsibility for wrongdoing (in essence, been taught that mom and dad are their personal servants, and they can do anything they want without personal repercussions), how can they be expected to act otherwise?

However, this begs the question: If you have realized that you’ve made serious mistakes and made genuine efforts to undo the damage your “parenting” (or lack thereof) has done, are you “helping” them by allowing them to continue using and abusing you, or simply continuing to enable their escalating deviant behavior?

[quote=AN] I’m of the mind that family who stick together and help each other will be better off than those who thinks everyone for themselves. My parents did everything they could for me (pay for my tuition, let me live at home for as long as I want, etc), and in return, now that I’m independent, I will be there to support them anytime they need/want me to. They would never have kick me out of the house and I will never put them in a home when it’s time for me to take care of my parents in return. I’m doing the same thing to my kids as my parents did to me. Just because my parents paid everything for me doesn’t make me lazy and a deadbeat. I help out around the house when I was little and start working when I was 15 and never stopped working since. But because they helped me out financially, it sure made my life a lot easier. I don’t have to worry about student loans. I can save a lot more than I would have if I have a pile of student loans to worry about. I will take that advantage my parents gave me to take it to the next level and pass on that advantage to my kids.[/quote]

This is the point that I have been trying to make: Your family **helps each other**. From your description, you and your parents have a mutually beneficial relationship, a true parent-child relationship. This does not exist in the “deadbeat” adult children we talk about here: they exist in relationships from which they, alone, benefit. They’re not grateful for their parents’ assistance and financial help because they don’t think of it as anything exceptional; they consider it their due, and that it is their parents’ responsibility to take complete care of them, and bail them out of whatever problem situation they manage to get themselves into.

And, yes, it usually results from the parents being enablers. It’s not a problem for the parents when the child is 12 because this is the socially-acceptable role for the parents at that stage of life. But when the child is 28 or 35 or 42, the parents are uncomfortable with the social role of complete caretaker. What’s more is that the stakes are higher with an adult child: the trouble they get into tends to be on a much greater scale, so it can have a much greater impact on the parents, physically, mentally, financially, emotionally. No matter what, eventually a time will come where the enabling parent will no longer feel good in that role. Yet they don’t know how to extricate themselves from it.

[eavesdropper]

[quote=AN]Ladies, I totally agree that if the child is abusive and the parents are affraid for their safety, the parents should kick the kids out of the house. On the other hand, if child are deadbeats and the parents are enabling that, the blame goes as much to the enabler as the deadbeat. If I screwed up as a parent and my children become deadbeat, then it’s my responsibility as a parent to fix that problem. [/quote]

This has been pointed out in several of the posts…in fact, I think the blame goes more to the enabler. A child (even an adult one) cannot act any differently than the way he’s been taught. If he/she has never been taught basic life skills or made to bear personal responsibility for wrongdoing (in essence, been taught that mom and dad are their personal servants, and they can do anything they want without personal repercussions), how can they be expected to act otherwise?

However, this begs the question: If you have realized that you’ve made serious mistakes and made genuine efforts to undo the damage your “parenting” (or lack thereof) has done, are you “helping” them by allowing them to continue using and abusing you, or simply continuing to enable their escalating deviant behavior?

[quote=AN] I’m of the mind that family who stick together and help each other will be better off than those who thinks everyone for themselves. My parents did everything they could for me (pay for my tuition, let me live at home for as long as I want, etc), and in return, now that I’m independent, I will be there to support them anytime they need/want me to. They would never have kick me out of the house and I will never put them in a home when it’s time for me to take care of my parents in return. I’m doing the same thing to my kids as my parents did to me. Just because my parents paid everything for me doesn’t make me lazy and a deadbeat. I help out around the house when I was little and start working when I was 15 and never stopped working since. But because they helped me out financially, it sure made my life a lot easier. I don’t have to worry about student loans. I can save a lot more than I would have if I have a pile of student loans to worry about. I will take that advantage my parents gave me to take it to the next level and pass on that advantage to my kids.[/quote]

This is the point that I have been trying to make: Your family **helps each other**. From your description, you and your parents have a mutually beneficial relationship, a true parent-child relationship. This does not exist in the “deadbeat” adult children we talk about here: they exist in relationships from which they, alone, benefit. They’re not grateful for their parents’ assistance and financial help because they don’t think of it as anything exceptional; they consider it their due, and that it is their parents’ responsibility to take complete care of them, and bail them out of whatever problem situation they manage to get themselves into.

And, yes, it usually results from the parents being enablers. It’s not a problem for the parents when the child is 12 because this is the socially-acceptable role for the parents at that stage of life. But when the child is 28 or 35 or 42, the parents are uncomfortable with the social role of complete caretaker. What’s more is that the stakes are higher with an adult child: the trouble they get into tends to be on a much greater scale, so it can have a much greater impact on the parents, physically, mentally, financially, emotionally. No matter what, eventually a time will come where the enabling parent will no longer feel good in that role. Yet they don’t know how to extricate themselves from it.

[eavesdropper]

[quote=walterwhite]Eaves, I’m with you. But why should the debt be nondischargeable. If you go to say a school for cobblers and you sign up for big loans based on the lies of the school, and there aren’t really any cobbling positions, how is it just to say, well, student, you’re dumb, so, pay up forever.

On the other hand, saddling a couple classes with crippling lifetime debt loads will send a strong market signal to future students that education is a scam.

But so will acfew thousand successful lawsuits againts law schools.

The system is rife with lies. It seems reasonable to me that a potential student should be able to rely on a law school brochures employment statistics. And I’m a pretty cynical bastard. But there should be no lying there. People are investingbyears of life and hundreds of thousands in debt. It’s a pretty material misrepresentation as they go.

The correct move is to go down swinging by establishing extraordinary credit prior to school, getting unsecured credit in the hundreds of thousands in credit cards. Then going solo, in massive debt, making payments on the loans but seining for the fences in your own practice.

I am willing to change my mind.

Personal resp. And due diligence… After a lifetime of lies from the educational system?

Not sure…[/quote]

Scaredy, I see what you’re saying, but at this point in time, I can’t endorse a discharge of the obligations unless it is at the costs of the financiers who made the loans. And that will never happen.

Once again, just as with housing, we’re seeing the cost of cheap money. Lending institutions were able to borrow the money at the incredibly low rates generously provided by the Fed, and the only roadblock to the phenomenally lucrative profits that could be generated from the ever decreasing prime rate was finding enough lending opportunities (aka, suckers). This is how school financing went from borrowing just enough to cover tuition, books, room and board to paying for luxury apartments, foreign travel, cars, and clothing. In fact, Octomom denied receiving “public assistance” in order to raise her (then) six children while keeping a local Toys-R-Us in business and paying for weekly acrylic nails, plastic surgery and in-vitro fertilization treatments; she, instead, stated that her expenses were covered by educational loans.

This was my first clue that, apparently, there was no oversight on the use of “school loans”, and pretty much no restrictions on the amounts. In fact, just as they were with housing and with equity loans, lending institutions were encouraging students to take ever-increasing amounts of funds for education. I was always under the impression that school loans were like grants: you had to show proof of expenditures/projected costs, and the checks were made out to the educational institutions themselves. While you could rack up a respectable amount of debt, it did not compare with what students are managing to incur these days. The universities themselves (and I’m talking about reputable brick-and-mortar institutions) are actively involved in programs that encourage greater student spending discretion, resulting in lucrative payoffs to the schools.

This should not be surprising. The baby-boomers were the first generation to send a significant number of its members to college, to be able to attend immediately after high school, to be able to attend four consecutive years of college, and to be able to send a large number of females to college. All of these factors resulted in tremendous growth of existing colleges/ universities, and the formation of others, in order to meet the high demand. However, since the 1980s, colleges have been struggling to attract adequate amounts of students to replace the boomers.

Many schools that should have been closed down or consolidated long ago have, instead, remained open, and now are being forced to compete with the for-profit schools. Most are having to make all kinds of claims and promises regarding the quality of their educational facilities and staffs, and about the potential for post-graduation employment, and most are not beyond outright lying in their claims, or at least creative manipulation and presentation of statistics. In addition, they are having to spend money on very expensive nonacademic facilities (student health clubs, shopping malls, gourmet food courts) with which parents can bribe their kids to go to college.

There needs to be fundamental changes in the way that Americans look at a college education:
(1) It IS an education. You are going there to learn. The primary purpose is not to meet your soul mate(s), to party, to have fun, to shop, to play sports, to have an opportunity to go on Spring Break, or to get chosen for an MTV reality show.
(2) It’s not a place to avoid adulthood for another 4 years. If that’s your goal, tell your parents to find a Montessori preschool for you, instead.
(3) It’s not a place to stash your kid because (a) you can’t deal with him anymore, or (b) you want to brag to your friends about your kid being in college. EVERYONE can get into college these days. He/she isn’t special.
(4) There is NOT the guarantee of a job when you graduate. This bears repeating: There is NOT the guarantee of a job when you graduate. Most of you will not be worth any more to an employer when you get out than you are now (and perhaps even less owing to brain cells lost from excessive drinking and stupid fraternity pranks). Even for the few of you that truly work hard and excel in your Ivy League institution, while your chances of getting a job are better, there’s no guarantee. Get used to it, and then go out and see some employers to find out what they look for in prospective employees, and take what they tell you seriously.

My opinion is, that if the above sentiments were broadcast in PSAs on a round-the-clock basis, we would have about 1/10 of the number of college freshman entering in September as are now projected. Costs would be a lot lower, taxpayers would save a lot more money as would parents, and employers would be no worse off than they are now.**

However, as this is unlikely to happen, I’m hoping for (as mentioned in my earlier post) serious government overhaul of student financing. This should include mandatory consumer counseling for both students and parents. They should also make students borrow all the money at one time. Let’s face it: most people would hesitate to go on a $20,0000 shopping spree at the mall. But how many people have $20,0000 or more in consumer debt. It’s the sort of thing that just creeps up on you. Students and their parents are much more likely to be conservative when made to come up with one overall number for the cost of an education. There can be stringent guidelines under which the number can be revised at a later date.

There were millions of people in America who, in the late ’90s and early aughts, bought waaaay too much house, incurred far too much consumer debt, took out too many HELOCs, and bought vehicles that were way out of their league. They did this with the full endorsement and assistance of the “smart guys” in the finance industry, because there was seriously big money to be made in “making loans” (collecting on them turned out to be not so lucrative…). This happened to the little guy on the street who was a 9th grade dropout, but it also happened to a shitload of guys and gals with advanced business degrees. The excuse they all cited was, “The bank wouldn’t have loaned me the money if I couldn’t afford it.”

This is the exact same situation as the one facing education loan recipients and their parents. I’m sorry for what they are facing, but nothing takes the place of due diligence. It doesn’t take long to figure out how much you can afford to borrow, especially now with the loan payment calculators available online. As I mentioned in my post the other day, $300K of debt translates into payments of $3,000 to $4,000 per month. Is it that difficult – especially if you are law school-eligible – to figure out that this is going to be an extremely difficult nut to cover? Also, it’s not that hard to look up actual employment figures: everything you need is available from the Department of Labor. It’s quite easy to determine trends in various employment sectors (cobblers, for instance).

Yes, I was born with a healthy amount of hard-wired skepticism (legend has it that I asked the delivering obstetrician if he was board-certified). I don’t take anyone’s word as gospel. However, when a $300,000 (that can easily grow to 2 or 3 times that amount) loan is involved, you bet I do a minimum amount of homework. When you tell me that a student of the law, of all professions, is bellyaching about the school lying to him, about paying too much for law school, about not knowing the particulars of his loan arrangement (including the amount), about the amount owed increasing because he hasn’t made payments or contacted the lender, I’m thinking that maybe the biggest mistake he made was in his choice of a profession. If there is anyone that should know better than to blindly take someone’s word as truth or to trust advertising, it’s a lawyer. And I would hope that, after 3 years in law school, he’s at least somewhat acquainted with contract law.

I do believe that the lenders should be prohibited from their (seemingly) arbitrary assessment of usurious interest, penalties, and late fees on education loans (actually, on all lending, but I won’t go there…). I think that, like all other cases of legal highway robbery, this is designed solely to engender huge profits for the lender and harass the borrower. However, I cannot endorse the abdication of responsibility for debts incurred by an intelligent and mentally competent adult.

For a textbook example of why education should not be considered an automatic right, check out the author’s story on the “Esquire Painting” website: http://esquirepainting.blogspot.com/ This is a guy lamenting his five-figure law-school loan balance from the early ’90s, who, IMHO, never should have gone to law school. He’s either refreshingly honest, or just clueless, but he’s very open about his experience, including his transcripts from Touro Law School, and grades from the Bar Exam he never passed.

**I am NOT against education. As a matter of fact, I firmly believe that we Americans need to acquire a helluva lot more. It’s a disgrace that a nation with so many resources has a population that is as undereducated as we are. And before anyone gets on my case about money and privilege, let me state that I’m including most of the college educated among us in that assessment. We go to school, and incur a lot of debt doing it. Yet we are, for the most part, not educated. Studies of college graduates are consistently showing that many are reading at no more than a fourth grade-level. We not only are far behind other nations in advanced math and science, but many of us can’t perform basic arithmetic functions without a calculator, such as division or percentages. To me, that’s the biggest lie being sold us by the university/college establishment. Instead of demanding that students function at the appropriate level, schools are “dumbing down” on their curricula, and pressuring instructors to grade students unfairly in order to raise their school’s ranking. They are not only sending uneducated and unqualified workers into the labor force, but workers that expect similar preferential treatment on the job.

[eavesdropper]

[quote=walterwhite]Eaves, I’m with you. But why should the debt be nondischargeable. If you go to say a school for cobblers and you sign up for big loans based on the lies of the school, and there aren’t really any cobbling positions, how is it just to say, well, student, you’re dumb, so, pay up forever.

On the other hand, saddling a couple classes with crippling lifetime debt loads will send a strong market signal to future students that education is a scam.

But so will acfew thousand successful lawsuits againts law schools.

The system is rife with lies. It seems reasonable to me that a potential student should be able to rely on a law school brochures employment statistics. And I’m a pretty cynical bastard. But there should be no lying there. People are investingbyears of life and hundreds of thousands in debt. It’s a pretty material misrepresentation as they go.

The correct move is to go down swinging by establishing extraordinary credit prior to school, getting unsecured credit in the hundreds of thousands in credit cards. Then going solo, in massive debt, making payments on the loans but seining for the fences in your own practice.

I am willing to change my mind.

Personal resp. And due diligence… After a lifetime of lies from the educational system?

Not sure…[/quote]

Scaredy, I see what you’re saying, but at this point in time, I can’t endorse a discharge of the obligations unless it is at the costs of the financiers who made the loans. And that will never happen.

Once again, just as with housing, we’re seeing the cost of cheap money. Lending institutions were able to borrow the money at the incredibly low rates generously provided by the Fed, and the only roadblock to the phenomenally lucrative profits that could be generated from the ever decreasing prime rate was finding enough lending opportunities (aka, suckers). This is how school financing went from borrowing just enough to cover tuition, books, room and board to paying for luxury apartments, foreign travel, cars, and clothing. In fact, Octomom denied receiving “public assistance” in order to raise her (then) six children while keeping a local Toys-R-Us in business and paying for weekly acrylic nails, plastic surgery and in-vitro fertilization treatments; she, instead, stated that her expenses were covered by educational loans.

This was my first clue that, apparently, there was no oversight on the use of “school loans”, and pretty much no restrictions on the amounts. In fact, just as they were with housing and with equity loans, lending institutions were encouraging students to take ever-increasing amounts of funds for education. I was always under the impression that school loans were like grants: you had to show proof of expenditures/projected costs, and the checks were made out to the educational institutions themselves. While you could rack up a respectable amount of debt, it did not compare with what students are managing to incur these days. The universities themselves (and I’m talking about reputable brick-and-mortar institutions) are actively involved in programs that encourage greater student spending discretion, resulting in lucrative payoffs to the schools.

This should not be surprising. The baby-boomers were the first generation to send a significant number of its members to college, to be able to attend immediately after high school, to be able to attend four consecutive years of college, and to be able to send a large number of females to college. All of these factors resulted in tremendous growth of existing colleges/ universities, and the formation of others, in order to meet the high demand. However, since the 1980s, colleges have been struggling to attract adequate amounts of students to replace the boomers.

Many schools that should have been closed down or consolidated long ago have, instead, remained open, and now are being forced to compete with the for-profit schools. Most are having to make all kinds of claims and promises regarding the quality of their educational facilities and staffs, and about the potential for post-graduation employment, and most are not beyond outright lying in their claims, or at least creative manipulation and presentation of statistics. In addition, they are having to spend money on very expensive nonacademic facilities (student health clubs, shopping malls, gourmet food courts) with which parents can bribe their kids to go to college.

There needs to be fundamental changes in the way that Americans look at a college education:
(1) It IS an education. You are going there to learn. The primary purpose is not to meet your soul mate(s), to party, to have fun, to shop, to play sports, to have an opportunity to go on Spring Break, or to get chosen for an MTV reality show.
(2) It’s not a place to avoid adulthood for another 4 years. If that’s your goal, tell your parents to find a Montessori preschool for you, instead.
(3) It’s not a place to stash your kid because (a) you can’t deal with him anymore, or (b) you want to brag to your friends about your kid being in college. EVERYONE can get into college these days. He/she isn’t special.
(4) There is NOT the guarantee of a job when you graduate. This bears repeating: There is NOT the guarantee of a job when you graduate. Most of you will not be worth any more to an employer when you get out than you are now (and perhaps even less owing to brain cells lost from excessive drinking and stupid fraternity pranks). Even for the few of you that truly work hard and excel in your Ivy League institution, while your chances of getting a job are better, there’s no guarantee. Get used to it, and then go out and see some employers to find out what they look for in prospective employees, and take what they tell you seriously.

My opinion is, that if the above sentiments were broadcast in PSAs on a round-the-clock basis, we would have about 1/10 of the number of college freshman entering in September as are now projected. Costs would be a lot lower, taxpayers would save a lot more money as would parents, and employers would be no worse off than they are now.**

However, as this is unlikely to happen, I’m hoping for (as mentioned in my earlier post) serious government overhaul of student financing. This should include mandatory consumer counseling for both students and parents. They should also make students borrow all the money at one time. Let’s face it: most people would hesitate to go on a $20,0000 shopping spree at the mall. But how many people have $20,0000 or more in consumer debt. It’s the sort of thing that just creeps up on you. Students and their parents are much more likely to be conservative when made to come up with one overall number for the cost of an education. There can be stringent guidelines under which the number can be revised at a later date.

There were millions of people in America who, in the late ’90s and early aughts, bought waaaay too much house, incurred far too much consumer debt, took out too many HELOCs, and bought vehicles that were way out of their league. They did this with the full endorsement and assistance of the “smart guys” in the finance industry, because there was seriously big money to be made in “making loans” (collecting on them turned out to be not so lucrative…). This happened to the little guy on the street who was a 9th grade dropout, but it also happened to a shitload of guys and gals with advanced business degrees. The excuse they all cited was, “The bank wouldn’t have loaned me the money if I couldn’t afford it.”

This is the exact same situation as the one facing education loan recipients and their parents. I’m sorry for what they are facing, but nothing takes the place of due diligence. It doesn’t take long to figure out how much you can afford to borrow, especially now with the loan payment calculators available online. As I mentioned in my post the other day, $300K of debt translates into payments of $3,000 to $4,000 per month. Is it that difficult – especially if you are law school-eligible – to figure out that this is going to be an extremely difficult nut to cover? Also, it’s not that hard to look up actual employment figures: everything you need is available from the Department of Labor. It’s quite easy to determine trends in various employment sectors (cobblers, for instance).

Yes, I was born with a healthy amount of hard-wired skepticism (legend has it that I asked the delivering obstetrician if he was board-certified). I don’t take anyone’s word as gospel. However, when a $300,000 (that can easily grow to 2 or 3 times that amount) loan is involved, you bet I do a minimum amount of homework. When you tell me that a student of the law, of all professions, is bellyaching about the school lying to him, about paying too much for law school, about not knowing the particulars of his loan arrangement (including the amount), about the amount owed increasing because he hasn’t made payments or contacted the lender, I’m thinking that maybe the biggest mistake he made was in his choice of a profession. If there is anyone that should know better than to blindly take someone’s word as truth or to trust advertising, it’s a lawyer. And I would hope that, after 3 years in law school, he’s at least somewhat acquainted with contract law.

I do believe that the lenders should be prohibited from their (seemingly) arbitrary assessment of usurious interest, penalties, and late fees on education loans (actually, on all lending, but I won’t go there…). I think that, like all other cases of legal highway robbery, this is designed solely to engender huge profits for the lender and harass the borrower. However, I cannot endorse the abdication of responsibility for debts incurred by an intelligent and mentally competent adult.

For a textbook example of why education should not be considered an automatic right, check out the author’s story on the “Esquire Painting” website: http://esquirepainting.blogspot.com/ This is a guy lamenting his five-figure law-school loan balance from the early ’90s, who, IMHO, never should have gone to law school. He’s either refreshingly honest, or just clueless, but he’s very open about his experience, including his transcripts from Touro Law School, and grades from the Bar Exam he never passed.

**I am NOT against education. As a matter of fact, I firmly believe that we Americans need to acquire a helluva lot more. It’s a disgrace that a nation with so many resources has a population that is as undereducated as we are. And before anyone gets on my case about money and privilege, let me state that I’m including most of the college educated among us in that assessment. We go to school, and incur a lot of debt doing it. Yet we are, for the most part, not educated. Studies of college graduates are consistently showing that many are reading at no more than a fourth grade-level. We not only are far behind other nations in advanced math and science, but many of us can’t perform basic arithmetic functions without a calculator, such as division or percentages. To me, that’s the biggest lie being sold us by the university/college establishment. Instead of demanding that students function at the appropriate level, schools are “dumbing down” on their curricula, and pressuring instructors to grade students unfairly in order to raise their school’s ranking. They are not only sending uneducated and unqualified workers into the labor force, but workers that expect similar preferential treatment on the job.

[eavesdropper]

[quote=walterwhite]Eaves, I’m with you. But why should the debt be nondischargeable. If you go to say a school for cobblers and you sign up for big loans based on the lies of the school, and there aren’t really any cobbling positions, how is it just to say, well, student, you’re dumb, so, pay up forever.

On the other hand, saddling a couple classes with crippling lifetime debt loads will send a strong market signal to future students that education is a scam.

But so will acfew thousand successful lawsuits againts law schools.

The system is rife with lies. It seems reasonable to me that a potential student should be able to rely on a law school brochures employment statistics. And I’m a pretty cynical bastard. But there should be no lying there. People are investingbyears of life and hundreds of thousands in debt. It’s a pretty material misrepresentation as they go.

The correct move is to go down swinging by establishing extraordinary credit prior to school, getting unsecured credit in the hundreds of thousands in credit cards. Then going solo, in massive debt, making payments on the loans but seining for the fences in your own practice.

I am willing to change my mind.

Personal resp. And due diligence… After a lifetime of lies from the educational system?

Not sure…[/quote]

Scaredy, I see what you’re saying, but at this point in time, I can’t endorse a discharge of the obligations unless it is at the costs of the financiers who made the loans. And that will never happen.

Once again, just as with housing, we’re seeing the cost of cheap money. Lending institutions were able to borrow the money at the incredibly low rates generously provided by the Fed, and the only roadblock to the phenomenally lucrative profits that could be generated from the ever decreasing prime rate was finding enough lending opportunities (aka, suckers). This is how school financing went from borrowing just enough to cover tuition, books, room and board to paying for luxury apartments, foreign travel, cars, and clothing. In fact, Octomom denied receiving “public assistance” in order to raise her (then) six children while keeping a local Toys-R-Us in business and paying for weekly acrylic nails, plastic surgery and in-vitro fertilization treatments; she, instead, stated that her expenses were covered by educational loans.

This was my first clue that, apparently, there was no oversight on the use of “school loans”, and pretty much no restrictions on the amounts. In fact, just as they were with housing and with equity loans, lending institutions were encouraging students to take ever-increasing amounts of funds for education. I was always under the impression that school loans were like grants: you had to show proof of expenditures/projected costs, and the checks were made out to the educational institutions themselves. While you could rack up a respectable amount of debt, it did not compare with what students are managing to incur these days. The universities themselves (and I’m talking about reputable brick-and-mortar institutions) are actively involved in programs that encourage greater student spending discretion, resulting in lucrative payoffs to the schools.

This should not be surprising. The baby-boomers were the first generation to send a significant number of its members to college, to be able to attend immediately after high school, to be able to attend four consecutive years of college, and to be able to send a large number of females to college. All of these factors resulted in tremendous growth of existing colleges/ universities, and the formation of others, in order to meet the high demand. However, since the 1980s, colleges have been struggling to attract adequate amounts of students to replace the boomers.

Many schools that should have been closed down or consolidated long ago have, instead, remained open, and now are being forced to compete with the for-profit schools. Most are having to make all kinds of claims and promises regarding the quality of their educational facilities and staffs, and about the potential for post-graduation employment, and most are not beyond outright lying in their claims, or at least creative manipulation and presentation of statistics. In addition, they are having to spend money on very expensive nonacademic facilities (student health clubs, shopping malls, gourmet food courts) with which parents can bribe their kids to go to college.

There needs to be fundamental changes in the way that Americans look at a college education:
(1) It IS an education. You are going there to learn. The primary purpose is not to meet your soul mate(s), to party, to have fun, to shop, to play sports, to have an opportunity to go on Spring Break, or to get chosen for an MTV reality show.
(2) It’s not a place to avoid adulthood for another 4 years. If that’s your goal, tell your parents to find a Montessori preschool for you, instead.
(3) It’s not a place to stash your kid because (a) you can’t deal with him anymore, or (b) you want to brag to your friends about your kid being in college. EVERYONE can get into college these days. He/she isn’t special.
(4) There is NOT the guarantee of a job when you graduate. This bears repeating: There is NOT the guarantee of a job when you graduate. Most of you will not be worth any more to an employer when you get out than you are now (and perhaps even less owing to brain cells lost from excessive drinking and stupid fraternity pranks). Even for the few of you that truly work hard and excel in your Ivy League institution, while your chances of getting a job are better, there’s no guarantee. Get used to it, and then go out and see some employers to find out what they look for in prospective employees, and take what they tell you seriously.

My opinion is, that if the above sentiments were broadcast in PSAs on a round-the-clock basis, we would have about 1/10 of the number of college freshman entering in September as are now projected. Costs would be a lot lower, taxpayers would save a lot more money as would parents, and employers would be no worse off than they are now.**

However, as this is unlikely to happen, I’m hoping for (as mentioned in my earlier post) serious government overhaul of student financing. This should include mandatory consumer counseling for both students and parents. They should also make students borrow all the money at one time. Let’s face it: most people would hesitate to go on a $20,0000 shopping spree at the mall. But how many people have $20,0000 or more in consumer debt. It’s the sort of thing that just creeps up on you. Students and their parents are much more likely to be conservative when made to come up with one overall number for the cost of an education. There can be stringent guidelines under which the number can be revised at a later date.

There were millions of people in America who, in the late ’90s and early aughts, bought waaaay too much house, incurred far too much consumer debt, took out too many HELOCs, and bought vehicles that were way out of their league. They did this with the full endorsement and assistance of the “smart guys” in the finance industry, because there was seriously big money to be made in “making loans” (collecting on them turned out to be not so lucrative…). This happened to the little guy on the street who was a 9th grade dropout, but it also happened to a shitload of guys and gals with advanced business degrees. The excuse they all cited was, “The bank wouldn’t have loaned me the money if I couldn’t afford it.”

This is the exact same situation as the one facing education loan recipients and their parents. I’m sorry for what they are facing, but nothing takes the place of due diligence. It doesn’t take long to figure out how much you can afford to borrow, especially now with the loan payment calculators available online. As I mentioned in my post the other day, $300K of debt translates into payments of $3,000 to $4,000 per month. Is it that difficult – especially if you are law school-eligible – to figure out that this is going to be an extremely difficult nut to cover? Also, it’s not that hard to look up actual employment figures: everything you need is available from the Department of Labor. It’s quite easy to determine trends in various employment sectors (cobblers, for instance).

Yes, I was born with a healthy amount of hard-wired skepticism (legend has it that I asked the delivering obstetrician if he was board-certified). I don’t take anyone’s word as gospel. However, when a $300,000 (that can easily grow to 2 or 3 times that amount) loan is involved, you bet I do a minimum amount of homework. When you tell me that a student of the law, of all professions, is bellyaching about the school lying to him, about paying too much for law school, about not knowing the particulars of his loan arrangement (including the amount), about the amount owed increasing because he hasn’t made payments or contacted the lender, I’m thinking that maybe the biggest mistake he made was in his choice of a profession. If there is anyone that should know better than to blindly take someone’s word as truth or to trust advertising, it’s a lawyer. And I would hope that, after 3 years in law school, he’s at least somewhat acquainted with contract law.

I do believe that the lenders should be prohibited from their (seemingly) arbitrary assessment of usurious interest, penalties, and late fees on education loans (actually, on all lending, but I won’t go there…). I think that, like all other cases of legal highway robbery, this is designed solely to engender huge profits for the lender and harass the borrower. However, I cannot endorse the abdication of responsibility for debts incurred by an intelligent and mentally competent adult.

For a textbook example of why education should not be considered an automatic right, check out the author’s story on the “Esquire Painting” website: http://esquirepainting.blogspot.com/ This is a guy lamenting his five-figure law-school loan balance from the early ’90s, who, IMHO, never should have gone to law school. He’s either refreshingly honest, or just clueless, but he’s very open about his experience, including his transcripts from Touro Law School, and grades from the Bar Exam he never passed.

**I am NOT against education. As a matter of fact, I firmly believe that we Americans need to acquire a helluva lot more. It’s a disgrace that a nation with so many resources has a population that is as undereducated as we are. And before anyone gets on my case about money and privilege, let me state that I’m including most of the college educated among us in that assessment. We go to school, and incur a lot of debt doing it. Yet we are, for the most part, not educated. Studies of college graduates are consistently showing that many are reading at no more than a fourth grade-level. We not only are far behind other nations in advanced math and science, but many of us can’t perform basic arithmetic functions without a calculator, such as division or percentages. To me, that’s the biggest lie being sold us by the university/college establishment. Instead of demanding that students function at the appropriate level, schools are “dumbing down” on their curricula, and pressuring instructors to grade students unfairly in order to raise their school’s ranking. They are not only sending uneducated and unqualified workers into the labor force, but workers that expect similar preferential treatment on the job.

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