When I got out of college, paying back my student loan debt was priority one. I had a take a deferment because I was out of work for awhile, but I paid the loans off, was never late with a single payment (that wasn't on deferment) and never bitched because I couldn't afford a Kobe beef burger.
Just want to point out that that's a lot easier to do when student debt was something like 10% of median income, rather than the 100% it is know. IE 10X as much, even inflation compensated.
And that's for responsible grads, not the idiots who blow their awards on trips or going to the most expensive colleges. It's not hard to graduate with student debt equivalent to a house.
They don't bother with pushing, anymore. They just go straight to "Yeah, you're going to college."
This. I'm sure there are exceptions, but even as I worked my way through school, seen what my brother went through, what his kids are going through, they've been ratcheting up the college thing to the point that if you're not in a ghetto school where graduation itself is an achievement, the default assumption is college. Hell, not even community college anymore, a 4 year university.
I graduated from high school in the late 1970's. At that time, and in that area, college was stressed for the high-performing kids. I was one of them, being a National Merit Scholar. The majority of my classmates went right from high school to working the line at Boeing. It was not until many years into my professional career that I was making as much as my peers who went to work for Boeing doing skilled labor, bearing in mind that they were working and making good union wages while I was working my way through college/grad/professional school.
And today change 'high performing' to 'passing' when classes are easier than ever.
