I’m going to go out on a limb and guesstimate that I have more debt than any of my friends. Even the kids in grad school, unless they got their student loans from the bank of Vinny-behind-the-pool-hall, will probably come out of it owing half to two thirds what I do now.
But, I’m getting a house out of it. Even now, with all the superfun imploding bubble economy crap, I’m still doing okay, in the long run. But getting back to the kids with the student loans…
Increasingly, it’s looking like a lot of people are going to be highly in debt for education which won’t get them into jobs which can even begin to pay for how much they’re in debt. If you can’t pay your student loans, in many cases even bankruptcy won’t get you out from under from student loan debt. If you can’t make house payments, you can just walk away, leaving the house and its attendant debt behind, and increasingly, home ownership is seen as such a goddamn precious and inalienable right that if you can’t make payments, even that might not be enough to really lose it.
Where am I going with this? It just seems interesting that the system seems almost rigged to be going feudal again, with homeowners tied firmly to land that they don’t really have title to (hello, banks), and only a feckless few making it to higher education (rich or determined or both).
I may be reading too much into this, of course…