College loans & credit card debt

Today at a town hall meeting in New Mexico, President Obama declared “enough is enough” on abusive credit card practices and called on Congress to pass credit card reform before Memorial Day. (The Senate is voting on a bill this week. The House already passed one.)

Credit card debts – coupled with onerous student loan burdens – hit young people particularly hard. As one study found, college graduates leave school with 41 percent more credit card debt than four years ago, with one in five owing at least $7,000 on plastic by the time they get their diploma. Check out some really troubling statistics and stories in this blog post.  One recent college graduate wishes he had gone to prison instead. (I don’t recommend that.)

As we know all too well, the cost of college is skyrocketing, financial aid is shrinking, and student and credit debt is hitting students and families hard. Private banks are currently making huge profits by taking taxpayer money and acting as the middleman for millions of students who are using loans to pay for college. Those profits would be better spent on valuable programs like Pell grants and Perkins Loans, expanding access and affordability for higher education. President Obama has proposed cutting the middle man out of student lending by shifting federal support entirely to the Direct Loan program, and away from the program that cushions bank profits. You can see that explained here Opening the Doors to Higher Education.

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Tags: credit card debt, financial aid, higher education

Thomas Bates Bio: Thomas is Rock the Vote's Vice President of Civic Engagement. @BatesThomas Email the author at: blog(at)rockthevote.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.