Young people between the ages of 16 and 24 face an unemployment rate nearly twice that of the rest of the population, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. 2010's 18.4 percent rate for youth was the worst in the 60 years that economists have collected such data. ColorLines notes that in 2010, 8.4 percent of white college graduates were unemployed, 13.8 percent of Latino graduates, and a dismal 19 percent of black graduates.
Those bright, shiny new degrees simply aren't worth the paper they're printed on all too often. The cost of a college degree is up some 3,400 percent since 1972, but as we all know too well, household incomes haven't increased by anything close to that number -- not for the bottom 99 percent of us, anyway.
Pell Grants for students have shrunk drastically in relation to the ballooning cost of a four-year college, and Paul Ryan wants to cut them even more, pushing some 1.4 million students into loans, more of which come each year from private lenders with little to no accountability.
The problem is simple. College costs have gone up by more than 30 times in the last 40 years, wages haven't. Yet, employed college graduates make nearly a million dollars more over the course of their working years than non-college graduates. That's a big gap between haves and have-nots. On the other hand, unemployed college graduates are facing tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
And let's not forget a lot of college debt is held by private finance players and big banks. There's a reason why they are more than happy to sacrifice this generation of college grads to the unemployment line to avoid any inflation whatsoever, because in an inflation economy, the creditor loses. In a deflation economy however, the creditor makes out like a bandit. And with wages falling across the board, it's turning into a real nightmare.
Something's got to give, and when it does, it's going to be brutal.
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