The Student Loan Crisis Solved

This is my regular column from the March 2012 Sturbridge Times Magazine.

Is there a crisis in education? I’m not sure, but someone thinks so. A headline from from USA Today back in October screamed “Student loans outstanding will exceed $1 trillion this year” beating out credit card debt. That may or may not be reason to panic. It could be that American youth have stopped buying X-boxes on plastic and are making a serious study of Plato and Socrates. Okay, I’m worried.

It was 1968 and a couple of more politically aware friends were going to speak to the local representative of a candidate for president. I cut a class to go with them. Though still ashamed of my dissolute academic career, what I heard that day has stuck with me. The fellow we spoke with made the point emphatically that his man saw equality and amity between classes and races hinging on education. Everybody says such blather, but the office seeker in question was George Corley Wallace. Yup, the man who had stood in the schoolhouse door to stop integration felt that if we all just got enough schooling, we could sing kumbaya together.

One should not try to make windows into other’s souls, but I’m not sure if Wallace was sincere. Certainly, the sentiment is part of the fabric of our nation. Universal education will lead us to the promised land. For some, it has, if that promised land is parts of metropolitan parks taken over by the Occupy movement. Granted, it’s not where they thought they were going to end up when they signed those first student loans freshman year.

Who would have predicted that an educated population would end up as a surplus supply of workers no one wants? Seymour Harris did some sixty years ago. Harris, a professor of economics at Harvard wrote The Market for College Graduates. His idea was there would be too many grads for too few jobs. He was laughed at, and though you can get many of his books on Amazon, The Market for College Graduates is not among them. To be honest, Harris predicted a collegiate job collapse a few times. Hey, if you foresee disaster long enough, a Katrina’s got to hit.

In the end it was all too predictable. How many middle managers does America need, especially as business has been squeezing middle management for years? Harris might have been wrong for a time, but education can’t be the answer. A national desire for universal sheepskins, if successful would be catastrophic. The day would come when you would hear people say, “Call a plumber, the pipes are frozen,” only to hear, “There aren’t any, but I can get you a sociologist.” “Anyone know when the garbage man is going to get here, it’s getting to be a mess,” would be answered with, “No, but I’m sure we can get a Ph.D candidate studying the Post Modern Novel as soon as you want.”

I only listen to radio in the car. On one sojurn I heard a program with a recording of an occupier telling how he had been promised a ticket to the middle class with his degree, but had only debt slavery to look forward to. Though one might suspect he could not name the person who had made the promise, we cannot deny that it is or was until recently a common article of faith. So there is an army of post college lads and lasses who bestirred themselves to live in semi-organized squalor* to protest, well, whatever. There was no coherent statement of views.

So what next. The last time this happened, young Americans of the college going demographic protested the draft. It was one thing to take kids from trailer parks and projects. Quite another, youth who perceived themselves as the managerial class. They had not done well on the SAT to slog through the jungle. Once the draft ended, the collegiate class went on with their lives, albeit in a world changed a bit by the so called counter-culture.

What is happening now is not so simple. There is a war on, but no one is conscripted to fight. The jobs are not there and the student debt looms. Add to that the loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Decades ago, some cute grads declared insolvency shortly after college. They had no assets other than a degree and future earnings. The sharpies should have been thrown out of court, but they ruined it for those who needed it. An army of former students faces payments they will never get ahead of with burger flipping jobs.

In order to help our youth out of eternal debt peonage, the Long Hill Institute of Educational Policy has come up with the only compassionate solution. It is time to reinstitute debtors' prisons. It will take a constitutional amendment, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Instead of dead end jobs for peanuts, there will be dignity.

The youth who could not finish the great American novel because he had to spend so much time on his pizza delivery job will now have more than enough. The theater major who couldn't get a job directing will now be able to do prison musicals. Think Prisoner's of Love from The Producers. Didn't get into Harvard Law? There's always room in the clink for a jailhouse lawyer. The vistas will open wide as the gates close shut.

*Squalor it can only be. Trust me on this. I've had the pleasure of spending time on bivouac. Camping is fun if your credit is good at Eastern Mountain Sports and you can come home soon.