"Educated" does not equal "smart".

Shouldn't she have realized at some point that her choice of studies left her unqualified for any job except that which requires her to spend an exorbitant amount of money on higher education?

But I have only a BS in engineering, so what do I know?

It cost $185,000 to study this?

It might as well have been about the Marvel Comics universe, unless there were tips on how to enslave masses in dire times.

Well, maybe the woman knows now that there isn't any record of many of the supposedly key points in whatever she was studying. There have been more expensive lessons.

If she's as brilliant as this article claims, then I'm sure she'll find a way to pay back the money she owes.

As to the other point made in the article -- that only rich people go to the "elite" universities -- that's always been the case. Anyone with a brain knows that going to one of the "elite" schools means that you're rich, not that you're smart. The only people who claim different are the people who went to those schools. . . .

Note that she says herself that she is "facing the job market in my mid-30s with no marketable job skills of any kind.”

Who's fault is that?

Of course, the government should not be involved in the student-loan market at all. A private lender would never have loaned such huge amounts of money for unmarketable degrees...

Looks like she may have wanted to take a business class or two. She could use some education on return on investment! Like sosij, I too only have an engineering degree, so what would I know about it?

Best comment over there?
"I don't often talk to Indian Catholicism majors, but when I do, I ask for a venti cappuccino" Chicago.

This is a case of not knowing when to stop. When she got her BA, she should have gotten out and gotten a job, AND THEN continued with her education. It's a pain in the butt surely...[I was working 60hr weeks when I went back to get my CS stuff done] but that is the ONLY way such a thing is tenable. If she gets through the doctorate, then she is a tenure track prof, but is there a wide-ranging need for a prof like this? Does she realize she will prolly be teaching freshman philosophy, to kids who could care less, forever?

Dunno, she describes herself as an academic, does that mean she is remarkably naive and has no common sense?

Then they go in and throw the whole class divide in there as if that somehow proves something. I may be wrong about this, but a number of my friends that have gotten advanced degrees, all of them working at the same time... they just couln't afford it any other way.

She, or someone claiming to be her, has commented that basically, she followed this course of study because, "I am convinced that I am doing what God is calling me to do."

Yet, a quick Google search reveals that the bible specifically discourages borrowing, especially in amounts unlikely to be re-paid.

I've attended church most of my life, and one recurring theme is that you cannot pick and choose which parts of the bible you want to follow. Someone with an advanced degree in religious studies, especially Catholicism, and who has been to seminary, ought to know that.

*I don't mean this to be a commentary on whether or not God exists, merely a note on her idiocy/hypocrisy.*

Bingo, SwissArmy. I got my BA, paid off my student loans, and seven or eight years after having repaid them, went for my master's. In a field with employment prospects. It took a year ... during which I *worked* a couple of demeaning and un-fun jobs ... but I found a job in my field that pays better (because I now have a mster's), and am currently repaying my student loans.

They are large ... but they are also my responsibility and I've known all along how much money I was borrowing.

This may sound bitchy, but if you're paying for your PhD, and not GETTING paid... you probably don't have what it takes to be an academic. Maybe its different in religious studies, but generally tenure-track positions are hard to get, and they go to people who've already won grants and stipends and prizes.

> This may sound bitchy, but if you're paying for
> your PhD, and not GETTING paid... you probably
> don't have what it takes

I think this true for two reasons. First, education is a huge commie machine, a Godless, incestuous cluster of government, industry and academe. (I say that with some affection. For a very long time the United States did an excellent good job of educating people and then getting the best labor out of them.)

Second, I think that many recent students and graduates who complain about the horrible explosion of college expenses aren't thinking clearly about their place in the economy anyway... They've just been showing up for lecture and are now pissed off that things aren't falling into place for them. Their willful blindness to marketplace realities is an enabling force in the explosion of academic administrative costs.

Yes, that's right... Excellent good, an excellent good job. I personally never made much time for the booklearnin'.

My god if I had that kind of student debt there'd better be an MD after my name.

I hope she's not also laboring under the belief that her Ph.D. will help her land an accomplished husband.

There is a reason the phrase "Its academic" means "its irrelevant".

Doesn't someone intending to borrow money ask themselves, or get asked by the lender..."So how is this going to be paid back?" Isn't that a fundamental question?

I never loan money unless the person borrowing knows how they intend to return it.

Lenders aren't worried about whether a borrower can pay back government guaranteed student loans. They know they'll get paid regardless of the student's inability or lack of intent to repay. I suspect that when someone knowingly borrows recklessly, so far beyond her ability to repay, as this "brilliant" woman has done, she never intended to pay it back to begin with.

"if you're paying for your PhD, and not GETTING paid"

That's been true in graduate education for decades: any doctoral program that admits a candidate without funding is, for pragmatic working people, in effect denying admission. As always, poker players know that if you don't know who the mark is, then the mark is you.

> rue in graduate education for decades: any
> doctoral program that admits a candidate without
> funding is, for pragmatic working people, in
> effect denying admission

What do you think of suggestions like this?

Another View in the DSM Register today:

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120501/OPINION/305010054/Another-View-Why-Johnny-can-t-pay-his-pile-of-student-loans

Ken R. is probably right. She thinks that if she whines loud and long enough, someone will swoop in and save her from her mean old huge unfair student loan debt. Because who wants to live in a world without Indian Catholicism experts???

PJ, I don't mean to get all, um, paradigmatically shifty on you here, but I think people aren't considering the biggest picture.

Wealth is created when assets are moved from lesser- to higher-valued purposes. Whatever you do for someone to make a living has to increase their happiness enough that they'll pay you for it.

What I don't see in the DSM piece, or hear in the rhetoric of the Occupiers, or feel from the vast majority of recession-addled Americans, is an understanding that this is the eternal human condition. Making money is tough! It requires perhaps the greatest ingenuity each of us can muster. It's a lifetime of risky, individual, often intuitive effort. No one can do it for us.

• Schools can only do so much... Anyone who really knows how to make the money you want to earn will have made it (and deposited the check) before you even get to their classroom in the morning.

• Paperwork horseplay isn't going to get us out of this, either. "Financial services" are the largest sector of our economy. More people try to make a living through the handling of other people's money than by any other method, and it's been that way for twenty years. You'll notice that it's not working out.

Maybe it's the collapse of religion, maybe it's the explosion of government... People have forgotten how to find the work of their lives. They even forgotten that they're expected to look for it, and to have faith that they can see things that other people can't see.

Wow, that's all I can say. I know a few people like this and, I think, they are somehow brilliant and stupid all at the same time. Sure it's not "fair" but either is life. You went to school until 30+ years old, have 100k + in student loans for a job with a starting salary of, maybe, 45-50k. That's IF there is a job available. I know people making that with only a high school diploma! A friend from high school majored in and is getting her PhD in French. Gee, THAT seems like a GREAT idea! She is now 31 and living under the poverty line in a tiny one bedroom apt.

I've attended church most of my life, and one recurring theme is that you cannot pick and choose which parts of the bible you want to follow. Someone with an advanced degree in religious studies, especially Catholicism, and who has been to seminary, ought to know that.

I know a woman who decided that since she couldn't live with her husband any more, she left him. A regular churchgoer, she has somehow converted the local church's admonition against divorce into a license to sleep around while still technically married.

I suppose that commandment is crossed out in her Bible, so she can do what she wants.

But, I digressed. Sorry!