I'm looking at going back to college next fall. Looking through the course catalog I saw the most amazingly stupid thing: a bachelor's in small business administration with an emphasis on entrepreneurship. How much better off would those students be if they just . . . started their own entrepreneurial business. Even if it burns down around your ears you've probably learned more for less cost.

My mind is still boggling.

When I went to a Maker's faire last year the laser cutters were $4000 each and $8000 each for the bigger version...though looking online I see some are cheaper. Still...you are going to have sell a heck of a lot of those things to make a profit.

She is working on her second degree? Now I understand why they are in so much debt.

Many freshly-minted M.B.A.s "are willing to sleep on a couch for a year or two, but they can't do it with the burden of student loans," he adds.

Hmm... none of the entrepreneurs I have know have been recent MBAs. Almost all have been some sort of engineering. The entrepreneurs have been already well established and are the cash source.

They are running up student debt, at the age of 30, getting a second degree each, while unable to support themselves without loans?

Ok, people are allowed to be stupid with their lives - the real problem here is enabling that behavior by loaning them money. What the devil is the federal government doing, loaning individual students money? That's our tax dollars they're handing out

Whats her first degree in? Also if they want to sell plastic throw away cupcake toothpicks why the fuck is she taking zoology?

Finally, according to this college newspaper article the little lady is from a family that has owned and expanded a jewelry business over 5 generations. The word used was "dynasty"

http://umaine.edu/news/blog/2013/04/01/cutout-for-business/

Seems to me they got the money

My advice to students who got buried under student loan debt: suffer.

You borrowed the money. You agreed to the terms. Now pay it back.

And if you're letting yourself get buried under the interest, you deserve exactly what you get. There are a million different ways to suspend student loan repayment for a time, and during this time, your loans will collect no interest and they will still accept payments during this deferment.

Yes, that's right. You can make student loan repayments with no interest.

If you're too stupid to take advantage of this, you deserve exactly what you get. It's natural selection. We're removing from the society those too stupid to survive, by burying them under a mountain of self-inflicted debt.

What the devil is the federal government doing, loaning individual students money?

Except they're not.

What they are doing is guaranteeing that the banks won't lose money.

Q: Which debts are you not able to write off during bankruptcy?
A: taxes and federally guaranteed student loans.

I'm sorry if these people can't do math, and were so poorly served by their grade school education to have never seen an amortization table until they were in college.

Additionally, who says they have to purchase a laser cutter? it might be more prudent to simply rent one on a per-job basis, then see if there is adequate demand for their products?

Elle said what I was thinking. They should have just started their business without going to college. Everyone that I personally know who has their own business did just that - got their start WITHOUT that college degree. Granted some of them got "seed money" from family; but, they all skipped that expensive college tuition step.

One friend who now runs his father's business doesn't have a degree; but, he has taken several courses over the years at the local community college. He just every so often signs up for a course that he thinks will help him understand the business better. The return on his investment for a course now and then is worth it - the whole degree, not so in his case.

Now THAT'S how an entrepreneur thinks; will this investment pay off? It sounds to me that it isn't student loan debt standing in their way; Rather, it is if these kids can't even understand basic ROI, how on earth can they be considered entrepreneurs? If I were banker, I wouldn't loan them money.

For me, college was never about figuring out how to make a lot of money. I basically used it as a bridge between being a child and being an adult. I was fortunate in that I had a full time job and my own apartment lined up when I graduated. A lot of my classmates didn't get that and were forced to move back in with their parents. As for the cost, my entire four-year education, including housing and meals, cost less than $10,000, which was paid for by a savings account set up by my parents. I cannot believe that the same education would likely cost someone more than $100,000 today.

So, these two declined to take out a small loan to buy a laser cutter which would help their business, but they have no problem going heavily into debt to get second degrees - in fine arts and zoology - in a recession.

If their business is incorporated, the laser cutter loan would be to the business and not to them - dischargeable in bankruptcy if the business goes under. However, student loans are personal and, in addition, cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

And we're supposed to view this story and condemn the student loan industry for unfairly constraining their entrepreneurial spirits - rather than view this story and see it for the whiny "why can't someone give me the money so I do whatever I want" story it actually is.

Why would an entrepreneur go to college in the first place?

All of us here (being old enough to read and type) have had it engrained in us for decades that The Thing To Do is go to college. It's time to accept that the world has changed. A college degree may be a benefit for the population as a whole, but that trend completely reverses itself if you just look at the young people. For young people, a college degree not only saddles them with debt, but they have a higher rate of UNemployment as well.

If I had a kid, I wouldn't send them to college, I'd send them to trade school or buy them a business franchise.

My heart goes out to the morons who borrowed too much, spent too much, and researched the job market too little.

It's a tragedy, it is.

Conan: "And we're supposed to view this story and condemn the student loan industry for unfairly constraining their entrepreneurial spirits - rather than view this story and see it for the whiny "why can't someone give me the money so I do whatever I want" story it actually is."

Yes, I think you have hit on something here. This story is part of the overall "Obama will save us" narrative. In this case is will help to justify (in the minds of sheeple) that reducing student loan interest or forgiving student loans will be a good thing. "See the economy would be better if it weren't for these unfair loans."

Got to comment: Why is the discussion about loans at all, shouldn't it be about the ridiculous increase in tuition.
But that won't happen, as long as the ivory towers preach lib ideals.

Why do ppl who want to become entrepreneurs go to college? College is for ppl who want a good job or even better - a job which pays a lot for doing no productive work(ie) college professor like Vivek Wadhwa and Shikhar Ghosh. Who the hell needs an MBA to start a business? Maybe just go the first couple of days and find some people willing to fund you, then once you find the funding and backing for your idea, quit the damn useless college and start working on your business..thats probably all that you need college for. No point in wasting two years and tens of thousands of dollars on paying salaries to the idiots who masquerade as profs there.

Why is the discussion about loans at all, shouldn't it be about the ridiculous increase in tuition. ~ Joe J.

The abundance of student loans is directly responsible for the increase in tuition.

As long as there is free money (free to the colleges) out there, tuition will rise to maximize the college's chances to grab as much of the free lucre as possible.

When the free money spigot dries up, colleges will have to lower tuition to attract students (or, at least, not drive them away) since the government then won't be giving easy credit to teenagers with the promise that they can pay it back later, after the party.

With so much easily-gotten student loan money in the system, colleges compete for students, not on academics, but on amenities and extraneous degree programs - raising the cost of keeping the college open.

Dry up the easy money and colleges will think twice before devoting facilities and money to "The Simpsons" as a philosophy course - and students might think twice before spending their hard-gotten tuition money taking such a class.

http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2009/02/25/the-15-strangest-college-courses-in-america/

Conan: "The abundance of student loans is directly responsible for the increase in tuition.

As long as there is free money (free to the colleges) out there, tuition will rise to maximize the college's chances to grab as much of the free lucre as possible."

So true, so true. The real irony is that, following a few college educators' blogs, I've learned that traditional brick and mortar institutions are saying sort of the same thing, except they do not blame themselves. They place all the blame on the for-profit schools such as DeVry and Univ of Phoenix. These schools, while not exactly innocent in this regard, are giving some students a degree that helps with employment; something which is not always true about the traditional schools.

Will Big Daddy government eventually offer relief for this problem? Almost certainly, since the "victims" of the problem are primarily FEMALE:

Women already outnumber men in college by 60% to 40%. The men who survive the feminized K-12 education system and do go to college are disproportionately the students enrolled in STEM courses -- those areas where good-paying jobs are plentiful enough to pay off loans and have money left over.

The women, meanwhile, are disproportionately populating the "ology's" and "______ Studies" majors that employers somehow do not find all that compelling.

And never mind starting a business. What (increasingly rare) marriage-minded man wants a "partner" saddled with a huge debt for a mostly-useless education (which most likely infected its recipient with a healthy dose of nasty gender politics, to boot)?

Will this be the first time in the history of the world that society allows women to bear the unpleasant consequences of their own choices? If you think so, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that you may be interested in ...

4 degrees between the 2 of them, and now they want to make zombie picks? I don't feel a lot of sympathy for them. They chose to borrow the money, and go for more than one degree that don't seem particularly related to their current business.

But yeah-college costs WAAAAY too much. It's gotten insane.

Patrick - what type of loans don't accrue interest while in deferment?

Federal loans continue to accumulate interest while in deferment.
http://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/deferment-forbearance#what-happens-to-the-interest-on-my-loan-during-forbearance

Sam, I spent five years working in student loans early in my career. There are some deferment programs for student loans in which the loans do not accrue interest.

The link you posted talks about a forbearance. Loans in forebearance always accrue interest.

Deferments generally have qualifications and time limits (e.g., an unemployment deferment only lasts 3 months at a time). The payments are suspended and, depending upon the type of deferment, interest is covered by the government. Deferments ca be granted for unemployment, going back to school, teaching in certain Census tracts, etc.

A forebearance generally has no requirements and can be done simply upon request. They usually last for a year at a time. Interest accrues and is tacked onto principal (meaning higher a amount due at the end of the forbearance), but no payments are required during the forebearance. Most loan programs have a limit on the total number of years one can have a forbearance (my own student loan had a 2-year limit).

The differences can be confusing. I had to explain the difference between a forebearance and a deferment to many borrowers and even to my own coworkers at times. Inexperienced or ill-trained coworkers would confuse the two and steer the borrower into the wrong program. They're not interchangeable.

"But yeah-college costs WAAAAY too much. It's gotten insane."

Yep. And a lot of it is not worth even half the money being paid. Many graduates are mal-educated -- they know less, in terms of what is acutually true, than they knew when they were freshmen.

My heart goes out to the morons who borrowed too much, spent too much, and researched the job market too little.

Many graduates are mal-educated -- they know less, in terms of what is acutually true, than they knew when they were freshmen.

Forgot to include this in previous comment...

So one of our "peers" in one of the India offices has been accepted into a PhD program there. Of course an email to everyone had to be sent out and, of course, every single other peer in India had to reply-all with congrats.

Most of us here were thinking, "Great, so we'll have a PhD now just passing the buck on every problem he runs into rather then doing his job and troubleshooting it."

Amount of education doesn't really mean anything. One of the best guys in our whole org (we're unix sysadmins supporting engineers designing chips) never finished college. He's legally blind too; works his ass off.

Sam NEVER question Patrick, he might start ignoring you and taking everythin you say (which he is supposedly ignoring) out of context, or straight up lie about what you said