If an accurate survey could be done today among recent college grads, we would certainly find that this $22 to $25 thousand debt load has jumped significantly higher. I would guess it's more than doubled and in too many cases quadrupled. As recent grads from June of 2011 still struggle to find jobs in the Fall of 2011, we'll start to see the beginning of the loan default title wave sometime in the summer of 2012.

The Star Tribune has reported on this issue over the years, starting with an April 30, 2009 story about a recent Concordia University grad who racked up $94,000 in student loans to pay for her communications degree. Her first job out of college: taking school pictures for LifeTouch Studios, a job that didn't quite net her enough money to cover her monthly loan payment of over $1,000. Here we are 2 years later and if anything, it's gotten much worse since then. Especially when you consider that the amount of unpaid student debt has gone over the trillion mark. When this all folds in a couple years, there will be no houses to repossess. Many of the co-signers on those loans will be in financial straits and unable to come up with anything.

With the recent government melt-downs over supporting things like higher education for the middle class, there is little room for optimism and a lot more room for a more elitist future, taking us back to the 1930s when only the wealthy could afford to go to college. There's too many waiters and waitresses with college degrees anyway. And that last thing we need is an educated and informed public because an educated and informed public would realize that there is something wrong here and might rise up and do something about it. The meritocracy of the past 50 years is coming to an end.

Maybe the Mayans were tracking student loans 1,000 years ago and that's what's coming to an end in December of 2012.

-Tim Corwin
July2011