The amount of student debt in delinquency, meaning the debtor has made enough consecutive payments on it, reached record highs in 2018.
Bloomberg reports that student debt delinquencies reached $166.3 billion in the third quarter and $166.4 billion in the fourth.
Imagine what a society could do with that amount of wealth. Consider, if higher education was considered an investment in society’s wellbeing, instead of a division of class and technical labor or a state-sponsored debt-slave racket. Imagine what $166 billion would be used on. Hospitals and healthcare, public transportation systems, infrastructure, providing employment training, conservation projects, investing in scientific research to quickly rid our civilization from a suicidal reliance on fossil fuels.
Instead, that $166 billion dollars represents wealth for parasites. These are investors, companies, hedge funds and sharks that have effectively gambled on a return from debt slavery. That massive amount of money represents generations of people whose lives are weighed down to debt-slavery for decades, if not their entire lives.
The fact that such an amount has reached delinquency reflects the working-class’ inability to pay off this extra level of exploitation. It means that the daily wage is hardly enough to survive on. The total student debt increases each year, and as more and more university graduates find an economy incapable of providing them with an adequate wage or labor to relieve them of that debt, we'll see a few things. Eventually, people will stop seeing the university as a means of reaching the 'middle class' (more fantasy than reality).
As Bloomberg states:
“The cost of higher education has roughly doubled in the past 20 years, and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis recently posted a blog entry asking “Is College Still Worth It?’’ The answer was not a definitive yes. One of the conclusions: “In terms of wealth accumulation, college is not paying off for recent college graduates on average -- at least, not yet.’’”
Second, we could see a debt bubble like the crash of 2008. Although student loan debt is 'guaranteed' (it cannot be forgiven, even if you declare bankruptcy), the institutions which have gambled on that debt and expect a return, they can collapse.
And collapse I hope they do. If only it were this easy!