So, after a strange series of events that included Jesse Jackson kissing me on the forehead (twice!) and being in a press conference (airing this evening on Chicago stations) I’m apparently handling the viral marketing for Reduce The Rate. I’ll be pestering you all to plaster info all over creation about this movement to:
* Reduce the interest rate on all student loans to 1%.
If banks can borrow at 1% or less, then so should our students.
* Extend the grace period before loan repayment begins from 6 months to 18 months for students who graduate.
In these tough economic times, it takes a college graduate an average of 6 months to 1 year to find a job. The rules should reflect this reality.
* End the penalties assessed to schools for student loan defaults.
Schools should not be held accountable for students who don’t pay back their loans.
* Increase Pell Grants to cover the average yearly cost of a public
4 year institution instead of the amounts in the current stimulus package–$5,350 starting July 1 and $5,550 in 2010-2011
Also, if you’re in Chicago you should come out to the Town Hall meeting at Operation Push Headquarters at 6 pm this Friday. I’ll be there and you can meet all sorts of nifty folks.
Hm. I funded my education at a private school via a combination of parental contribution, personal contribution, grants and loans. When I graduated in 1974 I owed $5000, which was a lot of money back then and took a few years to pay off. It was about 1/4 of the total amount of money that my education cost, so figure that the same amount today would have had me leaving school with a debt of about $40,000. It was also 1/4 of my annual salary of my first job. I paid off every dime.
My graduate degree tuition at a private medical school was free. It was paid for by a fellowship as long as I kept my GPA > 2.99. By that time I was married and my wife was working. The school was a commuter school in Chicago, so I was on my own for room and board. Two people trying to live off of my wife’s parochial teacher’s salary was not easy. We lived in an 150-year old farmhouse with no central heat (a couple of gas space heaters and a fireplace that I chopped wood for in the woods next to us), leaky windows and not a whole lot of insulation – the pipes froze on us more than once. And I delivered pizzas 3 nights a week, even though I was not supposed to have a job, sitting in a booth and reading my physiology and biochemistry books between deliveries. My wife worked there as a waitress some nights as well.
One of the waitresses happened by while I was reading a chapter on the effects of hormonal imbalances on human physiology. There was a picture of a young man whose genitalia was grossly undeveloped. She grabbed the book and brought it into the kitchen to show everyone what a pervert “Professor” was. After a number of shrieks and comments I walked in and said, “Hell, check this out” and flipped it to the previous page that had a picture of a 6-year old boy with the opposite problem. More shrieks. Nobody grabbed the book again.
I figured I was lucky to get the fellowship and never considered that the American public should be on the hook for my graduate education. If I wanted the extra employment options and better job and salary that a graduate degree represented it was up to me to earn it. Part of my decision to pursue the degree was whether or not we could afford it, as well as what my future earning capacity was with and without the degree. Someone who commits themselves to $100K+ of loans without weighing such factors first is a fool, not an unfortunate victim.
Sure. My brother has $100k in debt from graduate school but he earns a more because of his degree so he’ll be able to pay it off. Still, he was recently offered a scholarship to some school in Spain where his tuition *and* room and board would have been paid for. But he had to turn it down because he has since married and his wife and kids couldnt live without his income from his current job.