Life, but nothing like it.

College debt shows up a lot in these stories, actually. It’s more insistently present than housing debt, or even unemployment. That might speak to the fact that the protests tilt towards the young. But it also speaks, I think, to the fact that college debt represents a special sort of betrayal. We told you that the way to get ahead in America was to get educated. You did it. And now you find yourself in the same place, but buried under debt. You were lied to.

“Who are the 99 percent?,” Ezra Klein, The Washington Post (via hold-a-wolfs-ears)

The school I attended is being sued by the government for fraud. This isn’t some small-time hack school. It’s the Art Institute, a chain of for-profit colleges with real accreditation and campuses all across the country. They knowingly loaned huge amounts of money to low-income students who they knew could never afford to pay it back. They kept students who they knew didn’t have the skills to get proper job placement in their chosen field. And they happily gobbled up the federal loan money and left these students to the wolves, such as Sallie Mae, who is faced with a class-action lawsuit. They make a profit when students default on their loans.

They didn’t just lie to us. They concocted a scheme to get rich off of our misery. They profit by destroying our lives.

(via amydentata)

Reblogging because I have a friend who went to the Art Institute and this is happening to her right now.

(via nikkernoodle)

I fucking wanted to go to one of those places once too. Fuck that.

(via pencilscrap)

Ho-lee-crap…I had the choice to go to the Art Institute but decided not to when they harassed me for months. No joke, they called all hours of the day, called my high school, anywhere they could get the phone number to. They were worse than military recruiters, and they honestly scared me.

Now I’m extra glad I didn’t go.

(via umbertheprussianblue)

I went to the Art Institute.

I am so fucked.

(via catbountry)

BEHOLD the exact reason I refused to go to either the Institute or Al Collins. I did the walk through and called bullshit. Until the system comes up with a way to help educate and furthermore employ struggling artists, I refuse to pay into their system. An animation degree is $75k+. Guess how much they make on hourly wage, if they aren’t Glenn Keane. Go on, guess.

(via negacrow)

Ahhhh student debt, my personal bugbear. As a college graduate with university experience working nights at a coffee shop for minimum wage, guess what my personal thoughts on post-secondary education and the loans needed to attend are?

I spent $40K to wind up in a position where I work alongside people still in high school. And the biggest lesson I learned was that if you really want to get ahead, what you need to know? Is the right people. :\

(via randomredux)

So-oo-oo glad I live in Australia. Seriously: Government-owned student debt? It’s awesome.

CompSci degree was… $50k -ish? I think? I’m not even sure. The debt is to the government, not a private company. It’s adjusted for inflation, but there’s no interest per se. Repayments are deducted automatically via the pay-as-you-go income tax system, so you never get hit with a big out-of-pocket payment. The repayments are also quite nominal, are adjusted based on your salary, and are only deducted at all if you’re earning above a certain rate (which works out roughly as an entry-level white collar position; most retail is below the cutoff). If you never earn enough to get over the threshold… eh.

Yes, there are flaws in the system. But the biggest flaw not present is this situation where students emerge from tertiary education in a position worse than bankruptcy, with no way of escaping it.

So… yeah. There are other ways to handle tertiary education, and ours isn’t even the “best”. So if your country is so obviously DOIN IT RONG, you’ve every right to be pissed the fuck off.

(via randomredux)

Source: hold-a-wolfs-ears