[Sohcahtoa82]

Because our public school system is a propaganda machine for getting students to go to college.

They tell high school students...people who are legally still children that the most important thing is to go to college. They tell them if they can't afford it, they can just get loans.

And now people are surprised and blame the kids when they do as their teachers told them and rack up 5 or sometimes even 6 figures of student loan debt before they're even old enough to drink.

Fucking stop and pause for a moment and really consider that. Counselors, teachers, and all other high school staff pushing kids to go to college, and then when they do, people come along and tell them it was a bad decision? What?

[throwaway894345]

I don't think it's as malicious as you're implying. Educators went to school at a time when people who went to college earned dramatically more than those who didn't and they were pretty much guaranteed job placements. That's still true today in aggregate, although probably to a lesser extent. They also didn't anticipate that universities would become predatory with respect to ballooning costs and stagnating or declining educational quality. Moreover, they didn't realize that the kids they were referring to college were part of a flood of students who would saturate the job market with degree-holders (lowering the value of a degree with respect to job placement). Further still, they didn't know that the subprime mortgage bubble existed much less that it would burst in '07-'08.

[Sohcahtoa82]

The maliciousness is on the part of the people blaming the college kids for making "bad decisions".