Julian Dorey Podcast - #2 - College Part 2: STUDENT DEBT

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

SOLO POD - You’re a 17 or 18-year-old kid. All you want to do is get out of your parents’ house and live it up at college. And it’s not just a get-away either. It’s where you’re supposed to go. After all, you’ve been told over-and-over again—since you could walk and talk—that “you have to get a degree.”   So you sign the dotted line on a paper handed to you by some guy in a suit.    Terms like “interest rate” and “payment period” don’t mean anything to you at all. And that student debt price tag? $30,000? $50,000? $100,000?   You’ll figure that out later...right?   The student loans system is flawed to say the least—and it’s not getting any better. In this discussion, Julian deconstructs the problem piece-by-piece.   And the results are sobering. ~ YouTube FULL EPISODES: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q  YouTube CLIPS: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChs-BsSX71a_leuqUk7vtDg  ~ Show Notes: https://www.trendifier.com/podcastnotes  TRENDIFIER Website: https://www.trendifier.com  Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey  ~ Beat provided by: https://freebeats.io  Music Produced by White Hot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and they had to respond like everyone else. But again, the people getting fucked here were the average Americans trying to go to college because that's what the American dream tells them is a staple of it and something that they have to do. When I was a kid, one of my most common complaints was that I was an only child There's some benefits to that but the downsides are what we always pay attention to And for one thing I didn't love having all the attention on me the scrutiny My parents having only me to worry about you can imagine and some of you can understand What that's like.

And for another thing, I didn't have a sibling to come home to every day after school. Even one that maybe we drove each other nuts, but there's just that thing where you have that other little human or young human to bounce ideas off of or just even talk to. And so aspects of that kind of sucked to me, but it was what it was and that's just how I grew up. But my opinion on this matter shifted big time right after college. And the reason was, I very quickly realized that without ever having understood it growing up or even going through college, I effectively was born on third base or even halfway down to home plate. And the reason why is because i did not carry any college debt when i was zero years old maybe a week or two old whatever it was my parents opened up an account and they slowly and carefully funded it for 18 19 20 years but was still being funded while I was going into college.

And they didn't have any other kids to worry about. It was just me. So they could afford it. And they gave me one of the greatest gifts ever, which is to graduate from college, not only with a degree and a good education, but debt fucking free. And I realized just how big a deal this was when I saw so many of my friends around me without that advantage. So many friends who were graduating and to this day literally have to make life decisions, including career choices, based on the balance of their debt. And so I started to get real curious about this too.

And I started my career in finance. Now, I generally worked with people who were from a lot of means. I guess the buzzword that we used in the industry was ultra high net worth individuals. But I certainly had some situations, whether it was doing a favor for somebody or even a few clients where they weren't from as much money. And so there were more quote unquote real world decisions, everyday American type decisions to take into account financially. And a couple years ago, I encountered a situation that frankly became far too common of a story. And it really raised the alarm bells on this whole student debt crisis for me.

I was referred to an older guy through a mutual friend just to talk with him. The guy was not particularly wealthy, but he wasn't poor. So the old man calls me up, and he explains to me that his 17-year-old grandson is about to apply to college, but he's got a big problem. He already knew he was going to have to take out debt and to an extent that was fine but when he was applying for federal aid one of the things that would not be taken into account was his parents student debt and the old man proceeded to tell me that his daughter who was 45 had gone back to graduate school five six years before and had over six figures of debt.

I said, okay, what does she do now? And I don't even remember what he told me she does now, but my question right after he answered that was, is that related to the degree she got? The short answer was no. And the old man couldn't even remember what kind of graduate degree she got. He just knew she wasn't using it. And so I couldn't help myself. I said, well, why'd she go? And he said, you know, more education is better. Right? She wanted to go back and add and add a degree it never hurts

and so well i beg to differ where we're looking right now because the fact of the matter was because of the debt she was holding she couldn't really help with her son's college and so i i said to the old man i said what what do you want to do here and he said i want to do here? And he said, I want to pay down my daughter's debt in one shot. I said to him straight up, he had told me his net worth at the beginning of the call, just standard. I said, listen, man, I can't sit here and technically recommend that. That's not the fiduciary thing to do to throw the buzzwords around.

You're talking about taking a third of your net worth at an old age as a retiree with nothing but social security income and you're healthy from what you tell me, you're talking about taking a third of that and dumping it down the drain in one shot. Do you realize that? And he said, well, tell me another way. And I couldn't. I'm not going to tell a guy not to help his grandson out. So he did it the next day. And I hope he's doing okay these days. I don't know. I haven't going to tell a guy not to help his grandson out so he did it the next day and I hope he's doing okay these days I don't know I haven't talked to him but I started to get really curious

about the topic after this conversation because this wasn't just a student potentially taking on a ton of debt or making a huge financial commitment to higher education looking at it at age 17 it involved two other generations it involved a grandfather who was retired and was now dumping a ridiculous amount of his net worth into the problem. And he was dumping it into a problem that was. From the kid's mother. Who had just decided to go back and get a graduate degree and take on all this debt without really considering.

Whether or not it was going to be something she used or whether or not she could ever pay it or how it was going to affect her son in the future. I saw a cycle, a cycle of people just assuming that, yes, we have to go get higher education because that's what we do next. And no, we'll worry about money later. Doesn't really work that way in reality. And yet, time and time again, we see people do this. So I started asking a lot of questions to people. Just every day. Anyone I'd come into contact with.

Not being overly prying, but if somehow it came up in conversation around a topic where I could ask them about where they went to school or just curious if they had student debt, I would ask. And many of the responses I got were just amazing. And I continue to get them today. But some of my favorites are people in their 20s who can't even tell me what their interest rate is, don't even remember how much principal they have. Tell me they're worried about it, but that quote, they just don't like to think about it. And then somehow many of them proceed to go through their exact life plan. They tell me about the business they're going to open, what year they're going to open it,

how it's going to leverage the degree they got, when they're going to open it how it's going to leverage the degree they got when they're going to start a family like down to the day half the time they don't even have a girlfriend or boyfriend at the time but they can still tell me that they'll tell me when they're going to retire what year where they're going to move to you'd be surprised a lot of people if you ask them enough they have have this plotted out in their head. And the thing is, life happens. And shit doesn't work that way. There is no plan. This is bullshit. Plans change. It changes when life changes.

And unfortunately, one thing that will follow these kids around, if they can't figure out how to pay for it right away is the debt. If they don't have a way to get their balance lower, it's just going to grow. That's how interest rates work. And it's going to be an albatross that carries into the next generation potentially when they don't open up that business they were talking about at age 37 or whatever and that's the reason i sat down to do this research in the first place instead of just realizing it was a problem and seeing it affect different people around me in all different ways all the time i wanted to actually look at the vein and open it up and study the blood. I wanted to see how widespread this was, how far it's gotten, where it's potentially going next,

and all the different ways this affects many Americans in their daily lives. So this is part two of our series about college, and it's arguably the most important one we established the high cost in the last episode and now we're going to look at the debt that's come out of it and all the 45.1 million americans who hold it today i'm julian dory and this is Trend of Fire. understands this, but few seem to do it. If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions. I should note out front in the show notes for this episode, which will be on trendifier.com, as always, I will include the sources that you hear me cite throughout this episode. There's a lot of different numbers, but I picked out some of the best primary sources I could get and verifiable sources as well, but would love you guys to go through that and just double check

them yourselves. One guy you will hear me cite a lot, by the way, is a guy named Mark Kantrowitz. He is the publisher and vice president of research at savingforcollege.com. Absolutely phenomenal. His data is cited in thousands of publications, literally. I think he's been cited over 10,000 times as it relates to student debt. And so you will hear a lot of him today. But you heard me say towards the end of the intro back there that 45.1 million Americans carry student debt. Some other numbers to put into context right out front are the $1.6 trillion number, and that is the total student debt held within the U.S., $1.1 trillion of which is held by undergraduates alone, who are the main focus of our topic here.

The other sub $500 billion is held by graduate students. Furthermore, at graduation, as of 2019, the average graduate carrying debt has $29,900 worth of debt. These are pretty sobering numbers and out front they at least paint the picture of a seriously widespread institutional problem. So when did this balloon start sucking out all the air? Well, let's start with the TICAS for a little data around the growth of average debt at graduation for debt holders. So TICAS stands for the Institute for College Access and Success. And I'm just reading from their 2018 report that we're going to cite it said out front the current foundation funding for our project on student debt and other national

research and policy work comes from the bill and melinda gates foundation the rosa you know what i can stop it at bill and melinda gates i think they pretty much fund everything these days but pretty much they put their name behind something and it's a big deal. So naturally, this is a think tank that is seeking to provide research and therefore policy guidance on higher education and how it develops into the future. So the first chart that we're going to use is from them and it measures from 1996 to 2016 the average debt that the average debt holder held at graduation from college and it measures it in real dollars so we talked about this in the last episode but real dollars mean you take one year's dollar value and you relate it on an inflation-adjusted basis to every number on the chart.

So in this case, I believe they used $2,018. And what we find is that in 1996, the average debt holder at graduation had $12,750 of debt. By 2016, this number was at $29,650 and i told you right out front the number today by 2019 stands at $29,900 so luckily it hasn't gone up too too much over the last few years but that's a big number we also covered in the last episode how when the Great Recession happened, costs for colleges went up. And if you recall, I told you it's because states cut their funding to a lot of colleges or at least severely decreased it. And the way colleges made up for this is they jacked up the tuition costs, not necessarily the other expenses like room and board and all that, though they may have done that too.

But the TCAS, this organization, cites in their 2018 report – I don't have this number in front of me, so check it. Let me hit the photographic memory, see if I can remember it. But I think it's like page 7 or eight in one of the paragraphs they mentioned that schools raised or state schools i think raised their average tuition cost from 36 percent of the cost budget up to i think it was around 47 percent of the cost budget in the four years after the great recessioncession. So go double check that one because I do not have that exact number in front of me, but it was in that neighborhood. I mean, when you think about it,

this was schools pretty much looking at regular Joe, 17-year-old Joe, who was applying to come to their school and saying, oh, hey, Joe, congratulations, man. Nice job in high school. Great grades. Good job in high school. Great grades. Good job on the SAT.

Way to get the community service on there and play three different sports where you never got off the bench, but you can show you're well-rounded. And just to congratulate you, Joe, by the way, you're going to pay an extra six grand a year now just for the right to come here. That's what it amounts to. So I understand.

Schools lost a lot of budget that they had been counting on. And they had to respond like everyone else. But again, the people getting fucked here were the average Americans trying to go to college

because that's what the American dream tells them is a staple of it and something that they have to do now at first glance the federal government appeared like they were trying to help out in the wake of this crisis where cost of college are going up everyone lost all their fucking money in the great recession and people are getting really screwed taking on a ton of debt just for the right to go to college so the government came in and mathematically

they essentially added money to the pie by increasing the amount of federal aid they gave however when you look deeper at those numbers what they did is they actually ended up decreasing their subsidized loans and increasing their non-subsidized loans. And you say, what the fuck is a subsidized loan? A subsidized loan means that while you're in college, the government will pay your interest or I guess not charge you interest is the way to put it. A non-subsidized loan, on the other hand, is where the minute you sign the loan at age 17 or 18, whatever, the interest begins and the clock starts ticking. It's not like you're making a lot of money in college even if you're hustling in a side job. You got living expenses and all these things too. So to review, debt has increased significantly since the 80s and 90s. It only got worse after the Great Recession because schools had to make up for the loss of state funding.

Many schools did. And now it's falling on the average American who's stuck with a continually growing bill. And it turns out, though, that it's not just the kids who get stuck with it. And you shouldn't be surprised about this from the intro I gave you. And that little tidbit story I had. The parents are starting to feel the blow more and more and more as well. So let's dig into those numbers. For this, we go to Mark Kantrowitz.

And in an article that I, again, will cite in the show notes, he says, quote, over the last decade, average debt at graduation has increased by 21% for bachelor's degree recipients, by 39% for associate's degree recipients, by 50% for certificate recipients, and by 53% for parents. Furthermore, he gives data over the past two decades and that number for parents, they're also in last place. It's 193% on the increase. He also reports that 14% of the parents of all bachelor's degree students who borrowed are now carrying debt. That sounds like a small number, but again, there's 45.1 million student debt holders. 14% of them have parents holding debt. Furthermore, the average debt that these parents hold is also higher than the student debt. I told you the student debt now, the average of graduation is basically like a dollar below 30 grand.

The parents' average debt is $37,200. For a little perspective, on a non-inflation adjusted basis, so this is not real dollar values, this is literally what it was, but in 2000-2001, the average parent bill was $14,700. So even when you build in inflation there, it's increased tremendously. Now, we'll dig into it a little bit later on this point.

But there's an article in Forbes that mentioned that the 60 to 69-year-old age demographic has seen the most alarming growth on a percentage basis in the amount of student debt that they are responsible for over the last five years. And that period started from 2013 and ended in 2018, I believe. But we'll talk about that more soon. Now we have at least some idea of how quickly and how far this has grown. And also the fact that it's growing beyond just the students themselves. And that in the middle of all of it, colleges having exactly help matters. But let's put some hard, hard math to build on those big numbers I gave at the beginning of the episode. Let's put some hard math behind them and see exactly what the full story is here behind the debt, who holds it, and average graduate who is holding student debt graduates with $29,900 worth of student debt, and that is from Mark Kantrowitz, that number. When we look at the percentage of students that are borrowing, though, that number stands at 69%. For a little context, in the 1992-1993 school year, that number was only 49%. So not only did we already

mention that the student debt, the average student debt, is increasing tremendously, but also the average amount of the population of students who has to carry student debt in the first place has skyrocketed. And when you extrapolate this between four and five year degree holders because there's a lot of five-year degree holders it gets worse naturally it's an extra year of school instead of 69 percent of graduates holding debt 81 and a half percent of graduates with five year degrees hold debt and it's higher their average debt is more like 32 000 and when people also want to separate out by the way like private schools versus public schools we already covered in the last episode costs are nuts at public schools in a lot of ways as well but yeah more than half of

people who attend public schools are graduating with with debt and tie into this number of $29,900. Now we also mentioned out front that there's $1.6 trillion worth of total student debt, 1.1 of which, as you remember, is undergraduate debt. When you look at some of the data across the board, and the data I'm citing, again, is from Kantrowitz, beginning in 2003, at the beginning of 2003, I should say, this total number on a regular dollar basis, not a real dollar basis, the The actual amount in 2003 was around $200 billion. So over a 16 or 17-year period, we have seen that number increase times eight. Kantrowitz estimates that based on the current trends in college costs and what we've seen over the last decade in particularly that this number of 1.6 trillion that we currently have will be will reach 2 trillion by 2023 which almost seems conservative and the 3 trillion number will come by 37 38 that school year so yeah when you want to put a real math number on just how bad the

growth has been so far we're basically increasing the student debt by 2300 a second right now now how about how student debt stacks up against other forms of debt. I mean, at 45.1 million strong, that's basically 13-14% of the U.S. population carrying student debt, and it's only going to keep going up. But with the number at 1.6 trillion, the only subject matter of debt that outweighs it on a consumer basis is mortgage debt, which, in fairness fairness way outweighs it at about $9 trillion. I think that number is as of 2019. But let's look at other forms of debt that many Americans have, like auto debt. Where does that number stand?

It stands at $1.2 trillion. Student debt is now 33% larger than that at $1.2 trillion. Student debt is now 33% larger than that, at $1.6. Credit card debt, something that seems like everyone kind of has it at some point or another. That number is only at about $800 billion, give or take. It's about half, half the number of student debt. And here's the thing, too the number of student debt. And here's the thing too. Credit card debt aside, when you're looking at student debt in comparison to something like a mortgage or a car, it's not really a utility at all. In fact, when you're paying it and when people are carrying it it's after they've already

used it they already got the education they got the piece of paper on the wall now they gotta go about life and have all these responsibilities and be an adult and grow into their careers and take on other financial burdens

but they have this old debt that they gotta pay off as well and they're not getting anything from it And grow into their careers. And take on other financial burdens. But they have this old debt that they got to pay off as well. And they're not getting anything from it. When you take out a mortgage. You immediately put up a down payment. And not only do you live in the home and have a roof over you. Literal value that is a utility right there. But you also immediately begin building equity in the house when you buy a car now i'm not going to sit here and make the car equity argument we all know

what's what's the quote if it drives floats or fucks lease it don't buy it anyway either way we know that when we buy a car we're using it we get value from it every day it gets us from point a to point b that's it so at least when we're paying down a bill and depends how big it is on what kind of car you got it's something that's in our driveway or parked outside and it's going to get us to the outside, and it's going to get us to the office tomorrow or it's going to get us to the grocery store. It moves us around. It is a pure utility.

The student debt is something that was already done. It cannot be returned, and it no longer has a utility value unless you went to like Harvard because the truth is after you get the first job, again, my opinion, I stated this last episode, but it just doesn't really matter. And here's the other thing. As the debt goes up, it's taking longer and longer for people to pay it off.

In 2018, the number stood at about 15.5 years average amount of payoff from receiving the loan. Like that is the average amount of time it took a debt holder to pay off their debt. That's a long time. Five years before, it was 14 and a half years. So that number is even still creeping up and what's worse is when you actually start digging into the data of the debt and seeing where along the curve people fall i mean it's one thing to sit here and say like the average debt holder at graduation with a bachelor's degree has around thirty thousand dollars worth of debt okay but we know what average numbers can do maybe for whatever reason there's a disproportionate small amount of students number of students who are holding six figures of debt

from elite private universities and they skew it for everyone else reasonable to ask that question well that's not the case we have percentiles for this thing and we can see exactly where it stands so from kantrowitz again if we look at the 10th percentile of bachelor's four-year degree graduates holding student debt the amount of debt they have at graduation that number is 6500 Now that's a manageable number. For some people, it's a lot, and certainly they've got to pay attention, but it's manageable. However, when we increase just up to the 20th percentile, so we are in the bottom fifth of people now, that number goes to 15,313. The 50th percentile sits right near the average, dangerously close, at 27,000.

And once we're at the 75th of schools versus the average debt at graduation meaning after you take into account anything that's not a loan, like grants, federal aid, whatever, if you subtract that from the total number that a school charges, that gives you what's called net price. So you would think the schools with the lowest net price are going to have much lower debt for the average debt holder at graduation than the schools with the highest net price and while that pattern turned out to be true the debt is a nice amount lower it's not as low as i would have thought the bottom end of the spectrum that kantrowitz found and this is data as of 2016 says that at the least expensive schools,

the average debt holder has over $23,000 worth of debt at graduation. While at the most expensive schools, that number is just over $34,000. So the difference is not that monumental. This affects everyone across the board, regardless of how expensive the actual school you go to is. Meaning all of college is already expensive enough that even the least expensive ones saddle you with potentially significant debt. And to add insult to injury on this entire thing, what we got to remember is when people get a student loan or apply for them before college and receive them it's not like they just get like one loan like here's your loan there's four years

here's your rate pay it down that's not how it works first of all they may get it from multiple sources and secondly it's done usually on like a semester basis because you know the price of college technically changes year over year so just the sheer number of loans that they have at the end of this thing the average student is carrying like at least eight when they graduate i can't keep track of eight phone calls let alone eight different loans with maybe they have different interest rates they definitely have different principal amounts they have different start dates different potential end dates it's crazy like they don't even make it organized for these kids and on top of all these trends like this covers where we stand like we just gave a pretty full picture of how widespread this is and we'll add some

numbers to that as we continue to go on here but there's also some bad trends that are forming out of this massive growth first thing we should point out is that private loans are starting to have a comeback now private loans are loans that are not given by the government obviously they're private they're given by a third-party company they generally have not nearly as good of terms including way higher interest rates they're not advantageous you don't want to have to take those out now they fell tremendously when the government came in with their non-subsidized loans mostly post great recession but at least came in with federally controllable on an interest rate basis loans over the last five years though without bogging down into the numbers here it's very clear

that the amount of students taking out private loans is creeping back up secondly and i started to mention this earlier but now we're really going to put numbers on it across the board. The age brackets are starting to be wider and wider as far as who's affected by the student debt crisis. So when we break out, as of 2019, the full debt burden in this country, below the age of 24, there are 8.2 million borrowers at about $121 billion worth. Once we get to the 25 to 34 bracket, those numbers go 14.1 million borrowers 50 to 61 though now we're getting up there this is important because now we're looking at the parents there's a lot of parents in this group who are just sending their kids to college now or sent them in the last 10 years that number is at 241 billion dollars total with 6 million borrowers and most alarmingly above the age of 62 which you can bet your ass is pretty much all parents of students who went to school. The number sits at 2.1 million borrowers with $75.9 billion in debt. Now, how the fuck are you supposed to retire when you're carrying around

crazy debt and you can't even fund your own retirement in your own life in the first place? finally one of the things that increased in the wake of the great recession were Pell grants which are needs income based needs grants for colleges given out by the government and it's great

I won't get into the numbers but they've increased it tremendously. I do have that data. I'll probably have that link in the show notes as well, but it hasn't had the intended effect. That's the problem because 84% of all students who receive Pell Grants are carrying debt at graduation,

so the Pell Grants aren't covering nearly enough. They still have to carry debt. And the worst part is, you know, that number might not be bad if the debt's kind of low, but the worst part is a Pell Grant recipient's debt, on average, is significantly larger. The average Pell Grant recipient has over $31,000 worth of debt at graduation. Someone who didn't receive a grant who carries debt has an average of around $26,700. That data, again, according to Kantrowitz.

So the government's even doing more than they have in the past to help with straight up not debt, but like aid. And the aid's not even keeping up with the costs. And therefore, the debt is increasing on the people that it's literally designed to help. On top of all this, you got to consider what happens after the fact, too. Debt is part of your credit. Ties into a credit score.

So what about the people who become delinquent on their student debt? Career doesn't start off the best way that they wanted it to or how they envisioned it. They get in a hole and suddenly they fall behind on their payments. Well for one thing. That most likely means they have to forego grad school.

If they were planning on doing that. It also means they're not going to be able to buy a home. For the foreseeable future. You can't without a good credit score. It means they're going to have to make job decisions. Based on how the fuck they're going to pay down this debt. And it can even mean that the feds are going to garnish your wages because you are in delinquency. And beyond that, it's not even just students,

excuse me, graduates that we got to worry about. I told you, the American dream says that you got to go to college as a part of the American dream. And some of that has truth to it, and it's fair. But it's also convinced a lot of people to go to college who probably shouldn't be going to college. As Kantrowitz points out, no, this is not Kantrowitz. This is Forbes pointing this out. Just between 2015 and 2016 alone, 3.9 million students dropped out of college. And the total debt among dropouts was $28 billion. So I just did math off those two numbers, which don't tell you how many of them actually had debt

and stuff like that but if they all had debt that means that they're dropping out of college getting no degree quote-unquote falling behind their foreign society also having wasted their time as well and they're walking out with seven thousand dollars worth of debt and without a degree less opportunities fewer opportunities to figure out how to go pay for it so what does all this mean i gave you the example of joe out front joe's just a 17 18 year old kid who wants to go to college he's watched all the barstool videos he's looking for the good time he just wants to drink smoke and he's watched all the barstool videos he's looking for the good time he just wants to drink smoke and fuck that's it that's what joe wants to do

and you know what he knows he's getting an education out of it he's getting the paper and he'll be happy he did it but joe's looking to have a good time and joe has absolutely no concept i don't care what you tell me of what an interest rate is he absolutely no concept, I don't care what you tell me, of what an interest rate is. He has no concept of what $125,000 or $150,000 or whatever it is means for his future. whatever major he gets and whatever job he gets out of it after college and how that's going to affect how he makes life decisions to figure out how the fuck to pay his debt. And yet, this

is the system we've given them. Because costs have gotten out of control, but students still have to go to college. So if we can't stop the cost of college, let's just send them to college and give them debt for now and they'll figure it out later. And what we've seen is rising delinquency, rising debt, obviously. And people's lives in some cases ruined. All because they signed a paper when they were 18 years old

that makes no sense now i read a quote from the ceo of cengage which is literally like a textbook company this is uh michael hansen and this was in a cnbc article also will be in the show notes but to be clear hansen obviously is a huge proponent of college and understands all the values of it but even this guy makes a very valid point he said students are largely underestimating how long it takes to pay off their student loan debt this means they're probably not prepared for the life choices they'll have to make like putting off buying a house or starting a family. These are facts, man.

You're not thinking about what that number is going to be after you walk across the stage and the real responsibility sets in. And by the way, according to Kantrowitz again, 60% of student debt is held by women. And I point that out because Hanson there just explained one of the considerations is when am I going to start a family? You don't really feel good about starting a family when

say you're carrying 30 grand in debt at age 29. So women, obviously, they got to leave work when they're pregnant. And they got to have kids. And they're the ones carrying the most debt. This is having downstream effects on our ability as a country to continue to procreate and i understand that's a little bit of a stretch but that's a basic human experience of life that most people go through having kids you continue the lineage and now a part of that decision making process as to at least when it's going to happen or how long you have to wait is being held off by student debt conversations

and the very mothers who are going to have these kids physically are actually carrying the majority of the debt so yeah that's where we're at two parts down two takeaways are clear cost is through the roof and the debt's ridiculous we knew those takeaways you could have read the tweets read the memes whatever you knew those takeaways but now you have context to them you know the numbers you understand how far reaching it is you understand when it got out of control we didn't mention it as much in this episode but it's pretty clear the debt is tied directly to the cost and therefore since 1980 the debt has increased tremendously so from 1945 1980, we didn't see much of this stuff. We certainly saw nothing like the debt we're experiencing now.

This is a new world order when it comes to college. It's a world order that was created in the last 30 to 40 years. So it begs the question, and it's something that we talked about right out front in the first episode first part of this series doesn't mean college isn't worth it anymore doesn't mean that many of us shouldn't go and as i told you then and I'll tell you now my answer, my opinion is no it doesn't mean that at all but it's clear that the train has run off the tracks here

something went wrong the system needs a fix and paying off everyone's debt and making college free for everyone I just don't know that that's a viable solution the problem is too big. To say nothing of, there's also the issue among debt holders for that. As an example, one of my friends,

she paid off her debt and it was a lot. She paid off pretty much all her debt by the time she was 25 or 26. And a natural complaint she had about that potential solution of just canceling all debt is what does that mean for people like me who already paid all of it and did it technically did it by the book the right way even did it ahead of time not only do we not get rewarded for it but everyone else around us who didn't does. And that's a legitimate point. These are questions that are hard to answer. And I'm not going to pretend to have the answers to those.

Again, this is about starting the conversation. But anyway, in the final part of this three-part series, there goes my pen, but in the final part of this three-part series, we'll look into the reasons why the trains ran off the aforementioned tracks. We'll examine the forces that I think caused it, my theories or if I actually provide some clarity for them or if they have different ideas. I want to talk about all that. The only way for the system to actually adjust and change for the better, to have more controlled costs and less people just running the rat race and assuming they have to go no matter what without then also risking never having an opportunity to earn or live the American dream without the college degree. The only way for this to change is to open that conversation. To put these things at the forefront. For now, obviously, what a clusterfuck. I mean, if you listen to these two episodes, it's not great. It's not great.

But part three is going to be much less number intensive, much more theory intensive. And I'm excited about trying to dig through exactly how this all occurred and potentially where we go from here. I'm Julian Dorey. Thanks for listening to Trendafire. Catch you later, everybody.