Skyrocketing Student Loan Debt

One theme you will hear from me a lot is how our society is not investing in our people and that today's generations are pushing all of its obligations onto future obligations by using debt and cutting education spending (See Richmond's Attack on the Middle Class).

One more symbol of this is graduate school debt. There was an interesting article in the ABA Journal about how one-third of all law students expect to graduate with $120,000 of student loan debt. This is up from 19% of all law students just three years ago in 2006.

I hit on this theme a couple weeks ago in this article - Can We Afford to Cut Our Colleges. This is like starting off life with a mortgage. I have no idea how these kids ever save up the money to buy a house and start a life like my parents were able to do because of affordable state-supported colleges and graduate schools.

These trends are also true of college and other graduate school programs and are completely unsustainable.