One of the aspects of the student debt problem that no one wants to acknowledge is what it’s doing to families. If you can only earn $40 or $50K a year after you get that fancy degree, which most college grads do, you will never pay off your student loan debts of hundreds of thousands while you’re still young enough to have children. So that means your kid will be raised by strangers while you’re frantically trying to pay the salaries of (mostly liberal) college professors, who would prefer your kid be in care care.

You are told you won’t be able to have any kind of life without a college degree, but aren’t told what that overpriced piece of paper will really do to your life. Colleges get away with this because they recycle students every few years, so no one is around long enough to complain.

Higher education, while important to some occupations, is the biggest racket in the world, if you consider the ratio of expenditures to outcome. You are lied to about the value of that degree versus the debt you incur, and what it really costs you, and us, as a society.

Prospective students ought to be able to see a spreadsheet of what the degree will really cost versus what kinds of jobs they will really be prepared for as a result. I know too many people whose kids are doing jobs they didn’t need a college degree for even after college, while paying off mountains of useless debt.

Although no one can take away that degree you’ve earned, if it’s enslaving you and forcing you to give up being the primary influence over your children, what’s the point?

Heidi Harris