Lets get some more money to these poor struggling students.

Posted on: March 13, 2017 at 08:20:45 CT

What could possibly go wrong. Other than waste, irresponsibility, counterproductive values, the usual.....


'Higher' Education: College Students Spend Loans On Booze And Drugs, Expect Taxpayer Bailout

For years we've heard a lot about the terrible plight of those unfortunate college students who've been saddled with student loan debt. And, at least from Democrats, we've heard urgent calls for "debt relief."

What we haven't heard about, until now, is what exactly students are using their college loan money for. Now we know, thanks to a survey by LendEDU, a student loan news website.

In a nationwide survey, LendEDU asked students whether they were planning to use any loan money to help pay for travel or lodging for Spring Break. What they found was that nearly 31% said yes. That translates into nearly 2.4 million students, who will be using at least some of their student loan money to help pay for drunken revelries in Miami, Daytona, Cancun, the Bahamas, or wherever else college kids go for Spring Break.

The survey also found that substantial numbers of students admit to using student loan money for things other than education: 24% say they've used some of the money to pay for alcohol, a third for clothing or to eat out, 7% to pay for drugs, and 6% to gamble.

"Considering the severity of the student loan crisis in the United States, this number is severely disappointing," the report notes.

Disappointing is putting it mildly.

What this actually means is that taxpayers could, in effect, end up paying for these raucous college parties. And the thanks for this is due largely to President Obama's decision to nationalize the student loan program.

As IBD noted recently, the amount of student loan debt on the federal government's books has shot up by 125% since 2008. The entire increase is due to the fact that Obama nationalized the student loan program in 2010, cutting out private lenders and having the federal government lend the money directly to students.

Obama presented this as a big money saver, but he also loosened the requirements on paying back student loans so much that the program became known as the "Obama Student Loan Forgiveness" program.

The impact has been to inculcate financial recklessness in an entire generation of students, who feel they can pile up debt, spend much of it on things other than education, and then have taxpayers bail them out. (LendEDU found that half of students expect their debts to be forgiven.)

Not surprisingly, student borrowers are now delinquent on $31 billion of the $1.3 trillion currently owed to the federal government. And at 11.2%, the delinquency rate on these heavily subsidized student loans is 57% higher than on high-interest-rate credit-card debt.

It's not just taxpayers who are getting burned, either. As The Blaze points out, another report found that more than half of parents who co-signed their child's student loan said their retirement has been put in jeopardy due to late payments made by their child.

When historians write about Obama's legacy, one would hope they make sure to include the unfortunate results of his misbegotten efforts to "reform" the federal student loan programs.