The Human Face of Student Debt

[smrt]

I used to have an attitude of "well you should have known better sucka" which would be true if there were EVER a point in secondary education that someone taught people about obtaining a postsecondary education responsibly. Fact is, that it's learn as you go. Who sat you down and taught you, at age 17, to choose a career with good ROI, how to borrow responsibly, to evaluate the quality of colleges you were considering (using some random criteria made up by some expert) and then how to apply that in the workplace. Maybe your parent did, maybe a teacher did, maybe a counselor did - and if that's true, you were one of the lucky ones.
The fact is that there is an enormous hole surrounding this topic, and most people fall into it.

All of this is so true. When I started out 15 years ago, my parents didn't have the knowledge to guide me, and my high school wouldn't let me take vo-tech classes and College Prep classes at the same time, so I was pushed into a corner in which I had to choose between having a Plan A of going to college or having a Plan B where I fall back on doing hair if college doesn't pay off like it should. People are expected to know how to navigate these things, and there's only help if you know how to look for it, have time to look for it, and have the knowledge to understand it, and the savviness to know when they're being sold a bill of goods by a charismatic admissions counselor, or a misguided guidance counselor, or a parent who's living in an economy that hasn't existed in 10 years.