Shay’s Rebellion, The Whiskey Rebellion, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, The Know-Nothing Riot of 1856, The Boston Police Strike, Bonus Army March, Zoot Suit Riots, The Watts Riots. There’s a long tradition of men (and women!) taking matters into their own hands and striking out at the state or society over grievances.
Now, we have the Corinthian 15.
Mallory Heiney, a 21-year-old former student of the now-defunct Everest College, is part of a group of students refusing to pay back their student loans.
Heiney wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post in which she described the lies Everest allegedly told her as well as the insufficient education she says she received.
Heiney called Everest a “debt trap.” When she explained to her adviser that she couldn’t afford student-loan payments while in school, she was assured she could defer the payments on her $24,000 in student loans until post-graduation, according to her article.
That ended up being untrue, she said. Heiney said she was on the hook to start paying interest payments on her loans two months into her program.
The program also allegedly failed to provide her with a quality education. She said her teachers did little more than read aloud from textbooks, and she was unaware of basic concepts required to pass her nursing licensing exam. She said she was able to pass only by “spending hours researching the test questions online and watching YouTube videos.”
Heiney and 15 other students who attended the Corinthian College system have banded together to fight what they describe as predatory student-loan tactics by the financial aid offices and a failure to provide quality education.
The members of the group, referred to as the Corinthian 15, feel justified in their refusal to pay back their loans. They believe they are fighting for students everywhere who are manipulated by unfair university practices and are riddled with student loan debt as a result.
“In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus,” Heiney wrote in her article. “This soon led to the revolutionary Montgomery bus boycott. If those who came before us can take a stand in the face of persecution, harassment, beatings, imprisonment and even death, I will certainly stand in the face of wage garnishment and a tarnished credit report.”
Ah yes, Rosa Parks. That’s who comes to mind whenever I think of former students not paying their school debts. At least she did not compare herself to Jesus. I guess that’s something to celebrate.
Other former students are joining in, at least publicly, so maybe it is a thing. Then again, default rates are through the roof, over 15% according to various sources. It seems to be a tough figure to pin down because of the blend of private and federal lending. This report is the best I could find in five minutes of searching. Banks look to keep default rates below 2% as a rule. Anything higher is considered a problem.
Howling lunatic Elizabeth Warren is back again with another scheme to hand tax payer money to students who are in debt. That’s really not quite right as her scheme is about transferring tax payer money to her pals in the academy. No one ever seems to ask why college has become so wildly expensive. It’s just assumed to be an unalloyed good. No price is too high for the laying on of hands at the academy.
The sad reality of American higher education is that it has become a workfare program for the lesser lights of the managerial elite. If you have something on the ball you head off to the law of finance. If you are not terribly bright you end up in the economics department at local college. Most of what goes on at our colleges has nothing to do with training young people for productive work. That’s why tuition rates have skyrocketed.
But, that’s a subject we’re not permitted to discuss.
Now, whatever sympathy I may have for young people and their families facing modern college costs, I’m having a tough time mustering empathy for Ms. Heiney. The outsized sense of self-importance displayed by this young woman, the ring leader of this micro-protest, is a bit much. She is an adult and she foolishly entered into a bad contract. That’s not the fault of the taxpayers or the people who lent her the money.
That’s the trouble with the moaning about college debt. The people doing the moaning seem to be in a perpetual state of adolescence. Generation Onesie, raised by helicopter parents, expects the rest of us to pick up after them, tend to their boo-boos and organize our lives around them. The vibe that comes through in these stories about school debt is an overweening sense of entitlement.
Ironically, the institution inculcating this solipsism in the young is the source of their troubles, the colleges and universities. Go onto a modern college campus and it is a weird Potemkin village that operates nothing like the world around it. I always get the same feel as I get when I’m at a resort. It’s West World for young adults.
Elite universities are the worst. Just look at the graduation rates of these places and it is clear that failure is not an option. No one ever bothers to notice that schools allegedly offering the most challenging and rigorous education, have a near zero attrition rate. BUD/S training prides itself on its 65% failure rate. Ranger school is similar. Duke, in contrast, takes pride in its 99% graduation rate.
Ms. Heiney, who no one would mistake for an Ivy League graduate, nevertheless assumed that all that was required of her was to sign some forms, show up as requested, repeat what was was told to her and the world would be her oyster. This is the thread that runs through all of the complaints about school debt. No one takes responsibility for anything. Instead, strangers are expected to pick up the bill for the mistakes of these people.
One of the best lines Penn Jillette ever uttered was that government makes weasels of us all. You see it with college. The massive government loan system has turned the colleges into dependency rackets. Everyone involved is looking to separate the suckers from their money. The process produces waves of young adults expecting a good life at the expense of others.
The simplest and quickest way to end the problem is to end the government role in financing college. In short order, colleges will get cheap again, so that young people from modest backgrounds can work their way through school. Of course, we’ll need to find something for the Womyn’s Studies gals to do, which is why this will never happen. The ruling class needs a place to dump its misfits and that’s the college campus.
Modern universities are indoctrination centers nothing more. I read a 6th grade reader published in 1903 that would challenge most seniors at Yale today. When I entered the labor force a college degree was a ticket to success. Today I’ve seen GS-5 jobs requiring a masters degree. Some colleges offer grades that start at B, and the average is an A-, one wonders how many lesbian poetry majors they turn out. And then we wonder why these majors complain that despite a PhD in said studies and 200,000 in debt no one will hire them.
Yet there is a shortage of metal workers, welders, masons, diesel mechanics. Ever try and get a locksmith or plumber today? This country is screwed. We turn out more and more lawyers and fewer and fewer engineers. And we wonder why China is growing.
The big student loan bail out is coming. Whether we like it or not.
Obama has already proposed loan reduction and/or forgiveness for working in the “public sector”. I foresee a time when debtors will be able to spend some free time volunteering at approved charities and earning $15 per hour credit against loans. This can happen because the Feds have taken over 90% of the student loan sector.
There is no doubt that the college debt scam is well under way. The first step was to bailout the bankers. That’s been done. The next step is to buy off the voters who are in debt. The Cult is holding onto that card for later use. First they want the GOP to take the bait and rant about not giving the poor kids a freebie. Then we see the proposals for giving away the store. This will become another free grain allotment.
If I were a GOP candidate, I’d propose this:
1) Immediate forgiveness of all debt.
2) The end of all loan programs
3) The abolition of the Dept of Education. The savings will offset the cost of the loans over ten years.
4) Implement a ten percent endowment tax on colleges and universities.
But, the GOP is stocked with idiots.
Today college is just another way to delay becoming an adult. We should not let the hothouse flowers off the hook. They should repay their loans as a very expensive lesson on the road to assuming adult responsibilities. But I’m guessing the Feds will figure out a way to make everyone but them pay for their stupidity. The whiny, entitled Millennials continue to disappoint.
I have written before about my limited teaching experience, so forgive me for returning to this topic, but the idea of a ’99 per cent graduation rate’ made me smile. One thing that quickly became apparent on entering teaching was that the ‘students’ didn’t study. They copied things from Wikipedia at the last moment and ignored anything they had been taught in lessons previously. In fact, the days when we simply and to oversee them ‘completing their assignments’ saved the teacher wasting his or hear breath of trying to tell them things they weren’t interested in. On this matter, while I was telling some students about what to expect in the world of work post-college one of them told me that I talked too much.
Anyway, they all expected to pass, no matter what they did (or how little they did) and worse, the college expected them to pass because that was the only measure of success. That was how the mighty State paid the college, so it followed that for all the wages and salaries and grants to continue, all had to pass.
Consequently no one was allowed to fail. However poor their work (and believe me, it was poor) allowances had to be made. Eventually the end of the college year would arrive and this was very stressful for the tutors desperately trying to get the last bits of work out of the students in a vaguely acceptable format. When one student decided half way through the final term that he wanted to be in the navy and would leave (I shudder to think how much the navy admission test was skewed to making it easy for him to get in) we tutors had to accelerate his course so he could gain an early ‘pass.’
Even if students left early because they had found employment they had to be seen to have ‘completed’ the course or it was a black mark against the department. Leaving to get a job — which you might think was a success in its own way as the youngsters would be paying taxes and not draining the welfare and benefits budget — was not acceptable. The overriding demand was that the student, capable or not, had to come away with a pass, no matter what.
I expect that college had at least 95 per cent graduation rate, but if it hadn’t been for the hard-working tutors virtually doing the work for them, it would have been nearer 40 per cent.
Good point about the comparison to BUD/S and the Rangers, Green Berets, etc. You can try and be one of us and we’ll see if you have what it takes. The attrition rate is a point of pride, not something to be inflated unnecessarily.
Elite colleges should be the same I think. How mentally fit and disciplined are you really? Seems to me this is how it used to be in the olden thymes. Maybe someone can correct me if I’m wrong.
I remember working with a guy when I was just starting out in the work world. He had made it half way through BUD/S, his ankle gave out and that was the end of it. No whining, No mass protests about how unfair it was. He just went to work like the rest of us and worked on starting over at something else.
grey enlightenment makes a good point also, your credit will be ruined for a while, that’s about it.
technically, nothing can happen if you don’t pay student loans. They will try to take the money out any way they can, but they cannot throw you in jail for unpaid student loans.
Rosa Parks is way above Jesus in the liberal pantheon. In fact, Jesus isn’t even there.
When I was younger, I’d get feeling all superior and stuff to, say, the ancient German tribes for having taboos and not being able to call a bear a bear and resorting to “bruin” — brown one — instead.
Now I just shake my head the the endless multiplication of taboos in post modern times: gender, education, pensions, climate… I’d probably use up the character limit of this text box if I listed them all. It’s like a bunch of Middle Kingdom Egyptian priests invented time travel, infiltrated our institutions, and took over (now there’s a sci fi story line for you). Wasn’t that Moses guy supposed to take care of those cats?
Or to riff of Nietzsche, maybe mass culture is the culprit. Maybe while all of the great minds of the Enlightenment and 1800’s were inventing modernity, mass education, mass entertainment, and mass communications hoovered up all of those peasant superstitions, barely digested chthonic religions, and prejudices; ground them all up in the great subconscious whirl-o-matic; and spit them back out at us as the anti-vaccine movement, “climate change,” and gender theory.
Honestly, I like the Egyptian time travel theory more because at least it could end like a Hollywood action movie: Hero and attractive, 20-year-younger love interest find out that the President is actually Amon-hotep, high priest of — you guessed it — Amon. After overcoming impossible odds, our hero disrupts the broadcast of the State of the Union address to show video of Amon-hotep in his priestly robes doing some bizarre necromancy thing, thereby saving the Republic.
You’ll know it’s true when the media outlets start photoshopping pictures of our politicians to be really big and everyone around them to be really small.