Vocaboly.com

[Ray Woodcock]

[Excerpts from Village Voice article at
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0411/fkoerner.php]

The average student loan debt for an undergraduate ... is $18,900, up
66 percent since 1997; over the same time period, by way of
comparison, per capita income in real terms increased by just 8
percent. ... [O]ver a third of student borrowers are simply not
prepared to meet their debt service obligations once they've left
campus. ...

The twin burdens of debt and after-hours work, piled atop the rigors
of hitting the books, are a big part of why 600,000 undergraduates
drop out of four-year schools each year. ... [T]hose dropouts end up
making less long-term than peers who earned only an associate's
degree. "In addition," the authors add, "they (or their parents) pay
more in tuition and are more likely to have student loan debts than
are 2-year college students." In other words, the gamble on a
bachelor's came up snake eyes. ...

Last year, student defaults hit an all-time low of 5.4 percent, down
from a 1990 peak of 22 percent. ... [because] the federal government
got a lot more aggressive about pursuing deadbeats and using
collection agencies to force payment. Defaulters were punished with
additional fees and sometimes forced to enter consolidation agreements
that prolonged repayment until approximately the end of time. ...

[R]ecently, a pair of French economists, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel
Saez, found that between 1973 and 2000, the bottom 90 percent of
American taxpayers saw their average real income fall by 7 percent.
....