George Will has proposed a list of questions that Kagan should be asked. I like the list and hopes that Senators use some. My favorite:
-- Can you name a human endeavor that Congress cannot regulate on the pretense that the endeavor affects interstate commerce? If courts reflexively defer to that congressional pretense, in what sense do we have limited government?
Lists here and here
Monday, June 28, 2010
More Bias (This time on guns)
Headline AP: Justices extend gun owner rights nationwide
No, they affirmed gun owner rights. The headline as written implies that the rights were not there. Gun rights were already nationwide, just not in Chicago and some other places.
No, they affirmed gun owner rights. The headline as written implies that the rights were not there. Gun rights were already nationwide, just not in Chicago and some other places.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Media Bias Example
So this is the headline from Yahoo:
Yahoo actually modifies it from the AP, which read "GOP senators: Can Kagan be impartial judge?"
Now if there was a Republican President and Kagan was a conservative, the headline would read perhaps:
1. Kagan faces tough questions of controversial stances.
2. Does Kagan's positions lack compassion?
3. Many Senators uneasy about Kagan's ability to be impartial
Yahoo actually modifies it from the AP, which read "GOP senators: Can Kagan be impartial judge?"
Now if there was a Republican President and Kagan was a conservative, the headline would read perhaps:
1. Kagan faces tough questions of controversial stances.
2. Does Kagan's positions lack compassion?
3. Many Senators uneasy about Kagan's ability to be impartial
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
McChrystal Falls on his Sword?
AP WASHINGTON – The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan was fighting for his job Tuesday after being summoned to Washington to explain a magazine profile that included derogatory comments about President Barack Obama and his colleagues.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Gen. Stanley McChrystal's comments were "distractions" to the war in Afghanistan.
McChrystal, who publicly apologized Tuesday for using "poor judgment" in an interview in Rolling Stone magazine, has been ordered to appear at the White House Wednesday, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
He'll be expected to explain his comments in the magazine's profile, titled "The Runaway General," to the president and top Pentagon officials, officials said.
One of the more intriguing analysis is here:
Big Government: The interview of General McChrystal and his in Rolling Stone was not an accident, it’s a perfect example of suicide by interview. The General knew that every criticism would be “on the record.” He also knew that the President will have no choice but to relieve the General of his command after their meeting tomorrow.
McChrystal is a Four-Star General, a position you do not achieve by being an idiot. Today’s military leadership is well schooled not only in war-making but in diplomacy. He knew what the content of the article would be. He also knew that the article would lead his own dismissal (or the proverbial resignation letter where he says he’s quitting to spend more time with his family).
The Rolling Stone interview highlights the difference in the leadership styles of the President and the General. When this President faces a crisis, he looks for someone either internally or externally to blame. On the other hand, the General sees the War in Afghanistan reaching a crisis point because of the way it is being waged, rather than looking to find a scapegoat in his ranks as Obama would do, McChrystal found a way to let the country know what is really happening, while at the same time redirect any criticism for the war effort, away from his men and on to his own wide shoulders.
.... The Military commander was sending his troops and the administration a message. To the troops he was saying ” I have your backs even to the point of hurting my own career.” The message for the administration was, “Your way isn’t working, let us do what is necessary to win this war. Even though this was a violation of the Code of Honor, the General’s statements were a service to America and to his men by confirming what we all suspected, the President and his administration does not have a clue.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Minerals in Afghanistan - No Good Outcome?
I don't see how the discovery of minerals in Afghanistan has a good outcome for most of the people living there. Foreign companies will come in and setup all the mining operations and pay royalites to the current dictator in charge. They'll use that cash to extert control over the general population or export religious ideology across the globe. There is no undeveloped economy where the discovery of vast natural resources has benefited the general population. If the US leaves Afghanistan, there are four outcomes:
Possible Outcomes:
Possible Outcomes:
- A Secular dictatorship - Strong man keeps wealth for himself. He's so dominant that there isn't much rival wars, but he's too busy with himself to bother exporting jihad.
- A Saudi Arabia - nominally peaceful, but exports extremist Islam across the globe.
- An Ivory Coast or Congo - an African diamond rich country full of internal bloodshed as people fight over minerals
- An Afghanistan circa 2000, with tons of money - Actively recruits and trains jihadists and pretends to be an innocent peaceful country.
NY Times — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.
The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.
While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war. ...
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
Obama and the Oil Spill
Now that oil spill in the gulf has continued for over 50 days, there has been chatter about whether this is "Obama's Katrina" referring to the seemingly ineffectiveness of Bush in providing leadership during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
So is Obama to blame?
Can Obama propose the engineering solution to fix the leak? No, but he could do more than just leave it to BP. He could coordinate bringing in other experts, other companies, even BP's competitors. More importantly he could help lift the bureaucracy that is standing in the way of preventing environmental damage. There are twelve bureaucracies involved in the oil spill and they often get in they in the way. As the Chief Executive, he could get them out of the way!
So is Obama to blame?
Can Obama propose the engineering solution to fix the leak? No, but he could do more than just leave it to BP. He could coordinate bringing in other experts, other companies, even BP's competitors. More importantly he could help lift the bureaucracy that is standing in the way of preventing environmental damage. There are twelve bureaucracies involved in the oil spill and they often get in they in the way. As the Chief Executive, he could get them out of the way!
Human Events: On May 11, [Louisiana Gov. Bobby] Jindal applied for 24 permits to create sand barriers for the coastal marshes; the administration did not respond until eight days later. Even worse, they waited for 15 days to approve just six of the permits, and to this day, BP has only funded one so far.
The government/BP reaction horror stories continue. Terrebonne Parish requested 180,000 feet of hard boom. The Coast Guard approved 90,000 feet, but, under BP orders, didn’t deploy it all, and the hard boom was left on the docks while the oil hit the beaches.
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
The Student Loan Debt Crisis for Worthless Degree Receipients
For years, increases in university tuition have heavily outpaced salary growth. Mindless people have gone to college, taken out student loans in order to major in a degree than have little job prospects. Now we are supposed to feel sorry for them?
The primary driver of her problem is that she major in "women's studies", a degree with non-existent career options. So she spent $100K to get a degree than is essentially worthless. We've heard the term "worthless liberal arts degree", but now that comes at a heavy price.
I've had massive student loans, which could have easily hit $100K if I deferred it a few years. The big differential is that I majored in engineering and then business, degrees that offers job prospects. But before taking out the loans, I evaluated the cost of the degree against the benefits BEFORE going to school. And of course, while I was giving up weekends and nights to study, I'm sure she was out on the town.
Here's the story [with my comments in brackets]
NY Times: Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she's been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments.
This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues to pile up. [Yeah, and 8% interest on $97,000 is about $650 per month! It's a car payment just to keep the status quo]. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up.
Meanwhile, universities like N.Y.U. enrolled students without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual tuition bill. Then the colleges introduced the students to lenders who underwrote big loans without any idea of what the students might earn someday — just like the mortgage lenders who didn't ask borrowers to verify their incomes
Ms. Munna does not want to walk away from her loans in the same way many mortgage holders are. [Awfully nice of her]. It would be difficult in any event because federal bankruptcy law makes it nearly impossible to discharge student loan debts. But unless she manages to improve her income quickly, she doesn't have a lot of good options for digging out. [Things she should have thought of yesterday].
It is utterly depressing that there are so many people like her facing decades of payments, limited capacity to buy a home and a debt burden that can repel potential life partners. For starters, it's a shared failure of parenting and loan underwriting. [Why is a failure of loan underwriting if they can't discharge the loan with bankruptcy?]
But perhaps the biggest share lies with colleges and universities because they have the most knowledge of the financial aid process. And I would argue that they had an obligation to counsel students like Ms. Munna, who got in too far over their heads.
How many people are like her? According to the College Board's Trends in Student Aid study, 10 percent of people who graduated in 2007-8 with student loans had borrowed $40,000 or more. The median debt for bachelor's degree recipients who borrowed while attending private, nonprofit colleges was $22,380.
The Project on Student Debt, a research and advocacy organization in Oakland, Calif., used federal data to estimate that 206,000 people graduated from college (including many from for-profit universities) with more than $40,000 in student loan debt in that same period. That's a ninefold increase over the number of people in 1996, using 2008 dollars. [The big question is why has university tuition increases doubled or tripled inflation year after year.]
The Family
No one forces borrowers to take out these loans, and Ms. Munna and her mother, Cathryn, have spent the years since her graduation trying to understand where they went wrong. [You took out too much money]. Ms. Munna's father died when she was 13, after a series of illnesses.
She started college at age 17 and borrowed as much money as she could under the federal loan program. To make up the difference between her grants and work study money and the total cost of attending, her mother co-signed two private loans with Sallie Mae totaling about $20,000. [Mama should have checked her degree].
When they applied for a third loan, however, Sallie Mae rejected the application, citing Cathryn's credit history. She had returned to college herself to finish her bachelor's degree and was also borrowing money. N.Y.U. suggested a federal Plus loan for parents, but that would have required immediate payments, something the mother couldn't afford. So before Cortney's junior year, N.Y.U. recommended that she apply for a private student loan on her own with Citibank.
Over the course of the next two years, starting when she was still a teenager, she borrowed about $40,000 from Citibank without thinking much about how she would pay it back. How could her mother have let her run up that debt, and why didn't she try to make her daughter transfer to, say, the best school in the much cheaper state university system in New York? "All I could see was college, and a good college and how proud I was of her," Cathryn said. "All we needed to do was get this education and get the good job. This is the thing that eats away at me, the naïveté on my part."
But Cortney resists the idea that this is a tale of bad parenting. "To me, it would be an uncharitable reading," she said. "My mother has tried her best, and I don't blame her for anything in this."
The Lender
Sallie Mae gets a pass here, in my view. A responsible grownup co-signed for its loans to the Munnas, and the company eventually cut them off.
But what was Citi thinking, handing over $40,000 to an undergraduate who had already amassed debt well into the five figures? This was, in effect, a "no doc" or at least a "low doc" subprime mortgage loan. [Not really. A buyer could walk away from a house and mortgage debt in bankruptcy. If the lender can't walk away from student loan debt, why would a bank hesitate giving a loan.]
A Citi spokesman declined to comment, even though Ms. Munna was willing to sign a waiver giving Citi permission to talk about her loans. Perhaps the bank worried that once it approved one loan, cutting her off would have led her to drop out or transfer and have trouble paying back the loan.
Today, someone like Ms. Munna might not qualify for the $40,000 she borrowed. But as the economy rebounds, there is little doubt that plenty of lenders will step forward to roll the dice on desperate students, especially because the students generally can't get rid of the debt in bankruptcy court.
The University
The financial aid office often has the best picture of what students like Ms. Munna are up abbgainst, because they see their families' financial situation splayed out on the federal financial aid form. So why didn't N.Y.U. tell Ms. Munna that she simply did not belong there once she'd passed, say, $60,000 in total debt?
"Had somebody called me and said, 'Do you have a clue where this is all headed?', it would have been a slap in the face, but a slap in the face that I needed," said Cathryn Munna. "When financial aid told her that they could get her $2,000 more in loans, they should have been saying 'You are in deep doo-doo, little girl.' " [Come on, you're a big girl. It's always someone else's fault]
That's not a role that the university wants to take on, though. "I think that would be completely inappropriate," said Randall Deike, the vice president of enrollment management for N.Y.U., who oversees admissions and financial aid. "Some families will do whatever it takes for their son or daughter to be not just at N.Y.U., but any first-choice college. I'm not sure that's always the best decision, but it's one that they really have to make themselves."
The complications here go well beyond the propriety of suggesting that a student enroll elsewhere. Colleges don't always know how much debt its students are taking on, which makes it hard to offer good counsel. (N.Y.U. does appear to have known about all of Ms. Munna's loans, though.)
Then there's a branding problem. Urging students to attend a cheaper college or leave altogether suggests a lack of confidence about the earning potential of alumni. Nobody wants to admit that. And once a university starts encouraging middle-class students to go elsewhere, it must fill its classes with more children of the wealthy and a much smaller number of low-income students to whom it can afford to offer enormous scholarships. That's hardly an ideal outcome either.
Finally, universities exist to enroll students, not turn them away. "Aid administrators want to keep their jobs," said Joan H. Crissman, interim president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. "If the administration finds out that you're encouraging students to go to a cheaper school just because you don't think they can handle the debt load, I don't think that's going to mesh very well." [Actually the big issues is that if NYU and other colleges with a big liberal arts program would be comitting harikari if they started telling their students, "How are you going to pay back these student loans with this worthless degree that will never net you any higher salary than your high school diploma alone. ]
That doesn't change the fact, however, that the financial aid office is still in the best position to see trouble coming and do something to stop it. University officials should take on this obligation, even if they aren't willing to advise students to attend another college.
Instead, they might deputize a gang of M.B.A. candidates or alumni in the financial services industry to offer free financial planning to admitted students and their families. Mr. Deike also noted that the bigger problem here is one of financial literacy. Fine. He and N.Y.U. are in a great position to solve for that by making every financial aid recipient take a financial planning class. The students could even use their families as the case study.
The Options
The balance on Cortney Munna's loans is about $97,000, including all of her federal loans and her private debt from Sallie Mae and Citibank. What are her options for digging out?
Her mother can't help without selling her bed and breakfast, and then she'd have no home. She could take her daughter in, but there aren't good ways for her to earn a living in Alexandria Bay, in upstate New York.
Cortney could move someplace cheaper than her current home city of San Francisco, but she worries about her job prospects, even with her N.Y.U. diploma. [It's a worthless NYU diploma]
She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It's the highest salary she's earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women's studies. [Finally the article gets to the core of the problem. I see she isn't using her degree. What kind of job did she expect with women's study degree? It's not like you got a degree in construction and are having a tough time finding a job given the economic environment. She never stood a chance of getting a job in any economy. What was her rationale? Students will have to learn the cost and benefit of majors. Perhaps perspective students will think twice about majoring in "women's studies" in the future.After taxes, she takes home about $2,300 a month. Rent runs $750, and the full monthly payments on her student loans would be about $700 if they weren't being deferred, which would not leave a lot left over. [And interest keeps accruing. Is she waiting for a bailout?]
She may finally be earning enough to barely scrape by while still making the payments for the first time since she graduated, at least until interest rates rise and the payments on her loans with variable rates spiral up. And while her job requires her to work nights and weekends sometimes, she probably should find a flexible second job to try to bring in a few extra hundred dollars a month.
Ms. Munna understands this tough love, buck up, buckle-down advice. But she also badly wants to call a do-over on the last decade. "I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back," she said. "It feels wrong to me." [It is wrong to have spent a lot of money on a worthless degree.]
The primary driver of her problem is that she major in "women's studies", a degree with non-existent career options. So she spent $100K to get a degree than is essentially worthless. We've heard the term "worthless liberal arts degree", but now that comes at a heavy price.
I've had massive student loans, which could have easily hit $100K if I deferred it a few years. The big differential is that I majored in engineering and then business, degrees that offers job prospects. But before taking out the loans, I evaluated the cost of the degree against the benefits BEFORE going to school. And of course, while I was giving up weekends and nights to study, I'm sure she was out on the town.
Here's the story [with my comments in brackets]
NY Times: Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she's been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments.
This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues to pile up. [Yeah, and 8% interest on $97,000 is about $650 per month! It's a car payment just to keep the status quo]. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up.
Meanwhile, universities like N.Y.U. enrolled students without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual tuition bill. Then the colleges introduced the students to lenders who underwrote big loans without any idea of what the students might earn someday — just like the mortgage lenders who didn't ask borrowers to verify their incomes
Ms. Munna does not want to walk away from her loans in the same way many mortgage holders are. [Awfully nice of her]. It would be difficult in any event because federal bankruptcy law makes it nearly impossible to discharge student loan debts. But unless she manages to improve her income quickly, she doesn't have a lot of good options for digging out. [Things she should have thought of yesterday].
It is utterly depressing that there are so many people like her facing decades of payments, limited capacity to buy a home and a debt burden that can repel potential life partners. For starters, it's a shared failure of parenting and loan underwriting. [Why is a failure of loan underwriting if they can't discharge the loan with bankruptcy?]
But perhaps the biggest share lies with colleges and universities because they have the most knowledge of the financial aid process. And I would argue that they had an obligation to counsel students like Ms. Munna, who got in too far over their heads.
How many people are like her? According to the College Board's Trends in Student Aid study, 10 percent of people who graduated in 2007-8 with student loans had borrowed $40,000 or more. The median debt for bachelor's degree recipients who borrowed while attending private, nonprofit colleges was $22,380.
The Project on Student Debt, a research and advocacy organization in Oakland, Calif., used federal data to estimate that 206,000 people graduated from college (including many from for-profit universities) with more than $40,000 in student loan debt in that same period. That's a ninefold increase over the number of people in 1996, using 2008 dollars. [The big question is why has university tuition increases doubled or tripled inflation year after year.]
The Family
No one forces borrowers to take out these loans, and Ms. Munna and her mother, Cathryn, have spent the years since her graduation trying to understand where they went wrong. [You took out too much money]. Ms. Munna's father died when she was 13, after a series of illnesses.
She started college at age 17 and borrowed as much money as she could under the federal loan program. To make up the difference between her grants and work study money and the total cost of attending, her mother co-signed two private loans with Sallie Mae totaling about $20,000. [Mama should have checked her degree].
When they applied for a third loan, however, Sallie Mae rejected the application, citing Cathryn's credit history. She had returned to college herself to finish her bachelor's degree and was also borrowing money. N.Y.U. suggested a federal Plus loan for parents, but that would have required immediate payments, something the mother couldn't afford. So before Cortney's junior year, N.Y.U. recommended that she apply for a private student loan on her own with Citibank.
Over the course of the next two years, starting when she was still a teenager, she borrowed about $40,000 from Citibank without thinking much about how she would pay it back. How could her mother have let her run up that debt, and why didn't she try to make her daughter transfer to, say, the best school in the much cheaper state university system in New York? "All I could see was college, and a good college and how proud I was of her," Cathryn said. "All we needed to do was get this education and get the good job. This is the thing that eats away at me, the naïveté on my part."
But Cortney resists the idea that this is a tale of bad parenting. "To me, it would be an uncharitable reading," she said. "My mother has tried her best, and I don't blame her for anything in this."
The Lender
Sallie Mae gets a pass here, in my view. A responsible grownup co-signed for its loans to the Munnas, and the company eventually cut them off.
But what was Citi thinking, handing over $40,000 to an undergraduate who had already amassed debt well into the five figures? This was, in effect, a "no doc" or at least a "low doc" subprime mortgage loan. [Not really. A buyer could walk away from a house and mortgage debt in bankruptcy. If the lender can't walk away from student loan debt, why would a bank hesitate giving a loan.]
A Citi spokesman declined to comment, even though Ms. Munna was willing to sign a waiver giving Citi permission to talk about her loans. Perhaps the bank worried that once it approved one loan, cutting her off would have led her to drop out or transfer and have trouble paying back the loan.
Today, someone like Ms. Munna might not qualify for the $40,000 she borrowed. But as the economy rebounds, there is little doubt that plenty of lenders will step forward to roll the dice on desperate students, especially because the students generally can't get rid of the debt in bankruptcy court.
The University
The financial aid office often has the best picture of what students like Ms. Munna are up abbgainst, because they see their families' financial situation splayed out on the federal financial aid form. So why didn't N.Y.U. tell Ms. Munna that she simply did not belong there once she'd passed, say, $60,000 in total debt?
"Had somebody called me and said, 'Do you have a clue where this is all headed?', it would have been a slap in the face, but a slap in the face that I needed," said Cathryn Munna. "When financial aid told her that they could get her $2,000 more in loans, they should have been saying 'You are in deep doo-doo, little girl.' " [Come on, you're a big girl. It's always someone else's fault]
That's not a role that the university wants to take on, though. "I think that would be completely inappropriate," said Randall Deike, the vice president of enrollment management for N.Y.U., who oversees admissions and financial aid. "Some families will do whatever it takes for their son or daughter to be not just at N.Y.U., but any first-choice college. I'm not sure that's always the best decision, but it's one that they really have to make themselves."
The complications here go well beyond the propriety of suggesting that a student enroll elsewhere. Colleges don't always know how much debt its students are taking on, which makes it hard to offer good counsel. (N.Y.U. does appear to have known about all of Ms. Munna's loans, though.)
Then there's a branding problem. Urging students to attend a cheaper college or leave altogether suggests a lack of confidence about the earning potential of alumni. Nobody wants to admit that. And once a university starts encouraging middle-class students to go elsewhere, it must fill its classes with more children of the wealthy and a much smaller number of low-income students to whom it can afford to offer enormous scholarships. That's hardly an ideal outcome either.
Finally, universities exist to enroll students, not turn them away. "Aid administrators want to keep their jobs," said Joan H. Crissman, interim president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. "If the administration finds out that you're encouraging students to go to a cheaper school just because you don't think they can handle the debt load, I don't think that's going to mesh very well." [Actually the big issues is that if NYU and other colleges with a big liberal arts program would be comitting harikari if they started telling their students, "How are you going to pay back these student loans with this worthless degree that will never net you any higher salary than your high school diploma alone. ]
That doesn't change the fact, however, that the financial aid office is still in the best position to see trouble coming and do something to stop it. University officials should take on this obligation, even if they aren't willing to advise students to attend another college.
Instead, they might deputize a gang of M.B.A. candidates or alumni in the financial services industry to offer free financial planning to admitted students and their families. Mr. Deike also noted that the bigger problem here is one of financial literacy. Fine. He and N.Y.U. are in a great position to solve for that by making every financial aid recipient take a financial planning class. The students could even use their families as the case study.
The Options
The balance on Cortney Munna's loans is about $97,000, including all of her federal loans and her private debt from Sallie Mae and Citibank. What are her options for digging out?
Her mother can't help without selling her bed and breakfast, and then she'd have no home. She could take her daughter in, but there aren't good ways for her to earn a living in Alexandria Bay, in upstate New York.
Cortney could move someplace cheaper than her current home city of San Francisco, but she worries about her job prospects, even with her N.Y.U. diploma. [It's a worthless NYU diploma]
She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It's the highest salary she's earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women's studies. [Finally the article gets to the core of the problem. I see she isn't using her degree. What kind of job did she expect with women's study degree? It's not like you got a degree in construction and are having a tough time finding a job given the economic environment. She never stood a chance of getting a job in any economy. What was her rationale? Students will have to learn the cost and benefit of majors. Perhaps perspective students will think twice about majoring in "women's studies" in the future.After taxes, she takes home about $2,300 a month. Rent runs $750, and the full monthly payments on her student loans would be about $700 if they weren't being deferred, which would not leave a lot left over. [And interest keeps accruing. Is she waiting for a bailout?]
She may finally be earning enough to barely scrape by while still making the payments for the first time since she graduated, at least until interest rates rise and the payments on her loans with variable rates spiral up. And while her job requires her to work nights and weekends sometimes, she probably should find a flexible second job to try to bring in a few extra hundred dollars a month.
Ms. Munna understands this tough love, buck up, buckle-down advice. But she also badly wants to call a do-over on the last decade. "I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back," she said. "It feels wrong to me." [It is wrong to have spent a lot of money on a worthless degree.]
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