‘Help Jenna join the Convent!” A number of friends posted the link from fund-raising site YouCaring.com to Facebook, so I clicked. Jenna Andrews, it turns out, is a 30-year-old Catholic convert who’s trying to join the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne this fall. The Westchester-based order is devoted to caring for destitute cancer patients at the end of their lives. But it can’t accept Jenna until she pays off her $32,336 worth of student loans.
This is not a scam, folks. Last year, Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate reported that a lot of seminary candidates are “too poor to take the vow of poverty”: Many religious institutions are rejecting candidates who have too much educational debt.
With undergraduate and, in some cases, divinity-degree debt multiplying into the six figures while clergy wages remain relatively low, it’s easy to understand why seminaries can’t bless this kind of borrowing.
Of course, it’s not just the religious being sent off course by student loans. Young people across America are putting off marriage and starting a family because they’re so weighed down by the collective $1 trillion in accumulated student debt.
The Wall Street Journal reported on a recent survey by the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys: “Members are seeing a big increase in people whose student loans are forcing them to delay major purchases or starting families.”
In other words, student loans aren’t just altering our finances, they’re changing our whole social structure. They’re preventing us from pursuing the careers we want, from tying the knot, from having children when we want or as many children as we want.
This should worry liberals as much as conservatives: Whether you want young people to get married earlier and have large families or whether you want them to pursue careers as community organizers or other bleeding-heart low-paying jobs, you should care about the high cost of higher education and the ease with which students can take on such crippling debt.
Student loans used to be a no-brainer. College would increase your lifetime earnings significantly and make it less likely you’d be unemployed. For many, this is still true, says Richard Vedder, the head of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
“If you’re in the top quarter of your class at a good suburban high school or a private school and your SATs are above average and you’re accepted to a good private college or a flagship public one, you’d be foolish not to go,” Vedder says. “Even if you have to borrow money.”
But for others, it’s important to assess the risk. For every student who should definitely go, Vedder says there’s another one or even two “for whom the probability of graduating is 50-50.” And even if you do finish, the job that a graduate of a mediocre college ends up with may not be so different from the job you’d have without acollege degree. Surprising numbers of bartenders, cab drivers and supermarket managers have BAs these days.
Congress is fiddling with the student-loan system again, but the problem isn’t mainly with the rates that the politicians are adjusting — it’s with how much is being borrowed, with government enabling, for a degree that’s not worth it. It’s worse than all those “predatory” mortgage loans back before the 2008 collapse.
In other words, we need to make it less easy to foolishly borrow too much for college.
One idea would be to get student loans to work more like insurance: Students with a lower likelihood of graduating or who major in subjects unlikely to get them a well-paying job would have to pay a higher rate — or maybe not qualify for a loan at all.
Another improvement, says Vedder, would be to give colleges a little more skin in the game. Today, schools push students to take out loans, but nothing happens to colleges if students default. Why not make it so that colleges (especially those with large endowments) have to risk some of their own money on these kids?
In the meantime, young women like Jenna will simply have to put their lives on hold. And we’ll all be poorer for it.