Salaries Not Keeping Pace with Student Debt

This week, I ran into my long lost friend Mike, who just graduated in December from Savannah College of Art and Design. He crawled back to get a part time position at Beverly Hospital in the Food Service Department. Everyone seems to crawl back to our work nowadays. The college kids thing they're doing bigger and better things by getting a degree, and then to their surprise, there's no jobs available!! So Mike has a degree in animation (something like that?), yet he's back to his high school job of washing dishes and making patient meal trays.

That's not the worst part. Mike is over $100,000 in debt. So for this post I decided to research the fact that so many kids get out of college with enormous amounts of debt, yet they are making salaries no where NEAR close enough to begin to pay off these loans. And so if they are missing monthly payments, the interest is just going to go up and the debts are going to become bigger and bigger. It's overwhelming. It's really scary to know that all is definitely not solved in life once you graduate from college. When we're in high school all we hear is how a degree is going to get you so far in life. Yet now, the scary reality with our economy is that we may be paying off our college dues for the rest of our lives!! I don't want to have to struggle, drinking Natty Ice and eating Ramen Noodles until I'm 30!

The article that I read about this subject gave this statistic: "Between 2005 and 2006, average student loan debt increased 8 percent. In comparison, staring salaries increased by only 4 percent." This leaves constant worry that the graduates are not going to be able to successfully pay back these loans in a timely fashion. I also read that tuition prices are still increasing, another 6% or so this year. This means that by the time I graduate, my tuition will have been raised a total of 30%! That's insane! Loans are a scary reality for everybody, yet it is something we are all going to have to go through and manage on our own. I just hope that by the time we graduate we are all successful enough and find jobs rather fast, so we don't have to crawl back into the arms of our part time high school jobs, like my friend Mike did.


Article