One of my pet peeves is how the high cost of college tuition is creating a new debtor class in America. An outfit called the Project on Student Debt, which publishes data on the indebtedness of students at colleges and universities around the country, allows us to put numbers on the problem.
As it turns out, 57% of all 2009 Virginia graduates carried college-related debt; their average debt load was $19,918.
The percentage of public-university students with debt ranged from a low of 34% at VMI and UVa to a high of 81% at ODU. Debts tend to be higher at private institutions where tuitions are even higher.
Some of those students will enjoy a significant increase in their earning power thanks to the useful skills they learned in college. Others, who partied and boozed their way through school, will wind up with a useless credential. They would have been better off studying computer tech at community college. Of the many, many frauds perpetrated upon the American people, the myth that “everyone ought to go to college” — even if it means racking up $20,000 in debt — is one of the most pervasive and pernicious.
(Hat tip to Virginia Tomorrow.)
