In 1955, I started college at Syracuse University and paid $400. tuition for the first semester. Board and room was about $350. and I had worked all Summer at a canning factory for $.85 an hour to cover the board and room with some left over for books. My parents had extended their mortgage to pay the tuition. After the first year it was evident that neither my parents or I could make enough money to return so I got a job at GE. After being laid off I tried to sell cars but with one of the worse recessions ever that endeavor did not make out very good and I decided to return to school at the State University of New York at Morrisville, NY. It was a 2-year school but offered a med tech course which would allow me to continue in chemistry. The tuition was free at state universities in New York at that time and living at home I only, had to pay some fees and buy books. After 2 years I went to work for Allied Chemical as a chemical technician but quit after 6 months due to the long commute and went to work at our local hospital as a med tech doing the blood chemistries and helping the other technicians where needed. I started going to night school at Syracuse University and completed about 9 hours a year or as much as I could save enough money for. Leaving the hospital a few years later I went to work for Bristol Laboratories in Syracuse as a chemical technician. I continued to go to SU and take the required courses for a BA degree in chemistry. This took a few years since it was getting more expensive as the years rolled by. Bristol did refund half of my tuition after completing a course which helped but at the time, I was raising a family and it was still expensive. I finally graduated with my degree and by that time I had been promoted to a management position.
A few years later I was offered a job as a plant manager at another drug company with a lot more room for advancement. When I accepted the offer the CEO asked if I had a degree and I answered yes. He had never mentioned that the job required one before, but my degree gave me the job. The rest of my history is for another time but 17 years after high school graduation I received a degree at SU, and it allowed me to do things that would never been available to me without it.
The degree was necessary but today degrees are being earned for many areas and disciplines that are worth nothing in the workplace and Universities are encouraging students to go into dept to receive them. It is a shame that we, in the greatest nation in the world, have decided that it is all right to misuse our young people like this. A small loan may have helped me but was not available at that time. Now students are borrowing money to pay their cable bills and go out on Friday nights. There seems to be no limit and if they quit or receive one of the worthless degrees, they are saddled with a mortgage for many years which many times keeps them living at home instead of becoming independent. The guarantee by the government of these loans has allowed colleges and universities to increase tuitions to astronomical levels and paying 50, 60 or70 thousand a year for a degree in philosophy is ridiculous but they are doing it and the students are left with years of debt that the degree probably will not help them repay unless they continue to graduate school and incur more debt. A doctor friend of mine told me that he ended up with 2 mortgages with one his student debt and the other his home. He said it would take 20 years to repay them. This is part of the cost of medical and dental care today.
Instead of forgiving part of the student loan debt which helps only those still in debt and does nothing for those that have paid their debt or incurred no debt, the government should have capped the amount of money a student could borrow based upon discipline and forced the education institutions to start lowering their costs to maintain their student population. This would have helped curb the constantly raising costs and allowed more students to attend college without selling their futures to the lending institutions. Of course, the politicians would have not been able to reap contributions from the lenders anymore and colleges would stop playing politics with their extra income. It is time that we as a nation started to get real about education and stop indoctrination and using teenagers for profit. I'm ashamed of what we are doing to our student population now and hope that someone sees the light soon before it's too late.
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