Troubling Reports on College Students and Debt

One, from Fox Business, is headed Survey: Students Fail the Credit Card Test, An excerpt:

American college students are laden with credit cards, use them frequently, and have no idea what they are doing. Consequently, they are swamped with debt -- and the problem is growing worse by the year.

* * *

The primary takeaways: 70% of American college students have credit cards, five of every six of those students do not know their cards' interest rates, 75% of them do not know their late payment charges and 70% of them do not know what their over-balance-limit fees might be.

The result is predictable -- more than 90% of college students who hold credit cards are carrying monthly credit card debt.

So should college students reduce their credit card debt by increasing student loans?  Maybe not.  The Wall Street Journal reports To Pay Off Loans, Grads Put Off Marriage, Children.  Here's a paragraph from that report:

Most students get little help from colleges in choosing loans or calculating payments. Most pre-loan counseling for government loans is done online, and many students pay only fleeting attention to documents from private lenders. Many borrowers "are very confused, and don't have a good sense of what they've taken on," says Deanne Loonin, an attorney for the National Consumer Law Center in Boston and head of its Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project.

Comments

[Jenna Angle]

i agree with your comments really great stuff...

http://www.intelligentessays.com/
http://www.intelligentessays.com/page.php?id=1
http://www.intelligentessays.com/page.php?id=6
http://www.intelligentessays.com/page.php?id=7
http://www.intelligentessays.com/page.php?id=10

[Non profit credit counselor]

Credit cards motivate people to expenditure. Holding a card and paying with it does not give the real filling one has while paying with real paper money, and the debt is growing and growing. Maybe students, and in fact some adults either should get appropriate course on about how to use credit cards.

[College Students In Debt Weren't Blind]

Today's generation of credit card users in college isn't any different than that which preceded it, except in the fail expectation that they would step out into an economy that would employ them at prices far higher than today's grads are getting for employment which, for the unemployed grad, it is zero dollars.

Their mistake lies in having put all eggs in one basket. Did anybody ask 'With so many high school grads going to college under government subsidy, what if this situation turns into a glut of college grads? What will this diploma earn me in a slowed down economy?' It's BASIC economics -- high school level. But wait! Bureaucrats in high school know nothing of economics, except the union bosses, of course, who keep those wages artificially high.

So who do we have to blame for all this ignorance?

Parents who delegate the most important job of their lives to nincompoops -- the training of their own children to statist drones.

[Online Universities]

Sounds like it would be a good idea to educate students about credit cards and loans in high school. I remember a class in my jr high learning about basic things like that...

[Make Money At Home]

The same is happening in the UK. With the rising cost of course fees, many students find themselves up to £30k in debt by the end of their course. They will have to pay this back over the course of their lives!