Skooling

From the venerable and venereal New York Times, we have Private Loans Deepen a Crisis in Student Debt.

As the first in her immigrant family to attend college, Lucia DiPoi said she had few clues about financing her college education. So when financial aid and low-interest government loans did not stretch far enough, Ms. DiPoi applied for $49,000 in private loans, too. “How bad could it be?” she recalls thinking.

When Ms. DiPoi graduated from Tufts University in Boston, she found out. With interest, her private loans had reached $65,000 and she owed an additional $19,000 in federal loans. Her monthly tab is $900, with interest rates topping 13 percent on the private loans.

Ms. DiPoi, now 24, quickly gave up her dream to work in an overseas refugee camp. The pay, she said, “would have been enough for me but not for Sallie Mae,” her lender.

And while federal loans come with safeguards against students’ overextending themselves, private loans have no such limits. Students are piling up debts as high as $100,000.

Did someone put a gun to this kid's head to sign the loan?

If you're going to pay top dollar for your education at an expensive school like Tufts, you better have a way to pay it back (unless the "Bank of Mom & Pop" is financing you.)

Nobody made you go to Tufts, and nobody made you be a missionary at $19K a year. These are choices you have made, and these are choices that you have to live with. If you can't, go make real money, pay back the loans, and then go be a missionary.

Screw you, kid! You're going to have to learn economics the hard way.

“It’s a huge problem,” said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “When a student signs the paper for these loans, they are basically signing an indenture,” Mr. Nassirian said. “We’re indebting these kids for life.”

No, they are indebting themselves. It's "their" problem.