Huh

Turns out there are consequences to telling everyone, despite the fact that many of the jobs of the future will not require a college degree, that they should borrow lots and lots of money to pay for a college degree.

Piles of student loan debt are leading some borrowers to put off saving for retirement, buy a home and even get married -- and now many regret taking out the loans in the first place.

About three-quarters of student loan borrowers surveyed said they -- or their children -- have been forced to make sacrifices in order to keep up with student loan payments, according to a survey from the American Institute of CPAs.

... The majority of borrowers said they didn't anticipate having such a difficult time repaying their loans, and 60% feel some amount of regret about the decision to fund their education this way.

"[Graduates in debt] start out with an anchor that slows their progression toward future goals," Ernie Almonte, chair of the AICPA's National CPA Financial Literacy Commission, said in a statement.

And debt only continues to grow -- exceeding $1 trillion nationwide, with about one in five households carrying student loans. Meanwhile, the average debt load jumped 5% to a new high of $26,600 last year.

..."College can open up many opportunities, and we do not want that college degree to become more of a burden than a blessing for those saddled with unmanageable debt in a tough employment market," CFPB director Richard Cordray said in a statement.

Whoooooooooops too late!

Just like everyone needed to get a mortgage and buy a house a decade ago, now everyone needs to get student loans and buy an education. There's always some fucking one-size-fits-all solution being peddled to USians to mask the realities that our economy is a house of cards, the population has gone lopsided as Baby Boomers age, there just aren't enough jobs anymore, and there's a cavernous class divide facilitated by middle class-destroying economic policies that are promoted by politicians in both parties even as they propose individual solutions on how to get and stay in the middle class. Buy a house! (Whoops.) Buy an education! (Whoops.)

Tasking individuals with finding solutions to systemic problems doesn't work, and telling young people to get an education at any cost, when the cost demonstrably includes for many of them fucking their adult lives before they've even started, is an individual solution to a systemic problem that's about trade policies, taxation, demographics, domestic spending priorities, and a whole host of other lumbering national issues over which an entire generation of young people has no control, no less any one individual young person.

What power the people had has been sold away.

US voters have sold away their standard of living, their quality of education, their jobs, their worker protections, their civil liberties, their social safety net, their national security, their environment, their economy, their very democracy itself—all in exchange for the gossamer promise of individual success, even though a society of disconnected individuals without responsibility for one another isn't a society at all.

And so the younger generation is left a broken nation, told to make their way with mortgaged bootstraps, to which has been pinned a notice of foreclosure.