Sometimes You Just Want To Scream

What kind of an idiot screams at his radio when he is driving along? Me! As I listen to news and talk, sometime I just have to let it out. Often, this happens as I listen to National Public Radio, some of whose anchors and interviewers must have concluded long ago that listeners are incapable of independent thought and, therefore, can be fed any sort of dribble without risk that the listener will consider what is being said critically. One such "sometime" occurred tonight as I was driving to met a friend.

The particular segment of the evening news roundup dealt with a young woman, a recent college graduate, who the reporter was following over time as she struggled to find a job. After months of unemployment, she finally found a job for which she was way overqualified. As I recall, it was something in the travel industry, and the woman was oozing with delight that she had a job.

The interviewer asked what kind of a job the woman had been looking for and she replied, "a coffee shop job." The position she acquired clearly was "a step or two up from that." Then, the interviewer asked where the woman had pictured herself being at this time in her life when she graduated from college. " On a PhD track," was the reply. "In what?" "Literature and Creative Writing."

I wanted to scream and scream I did. Gee, no wonder the woman had been frustrated in her job search. She was qualified to do nothing except, perhaps, teach and that hadn't been what she was seeking. While the interviewer sought to portray the plight of this woman with great sympathy -- a worker in the travel industry obviously is a position no one should be proud to have as employment. But, I wondered what the woman expected.

The interviewer never asked the woman how she expected to be employed given her training and never inquired what, if any, loans the woman had obtained while going to school or how she thought she might pay them back after she obtained the PhD in "literature" or "creative writing."

More generally, it seems to me (and to lots of other, I think) that students today given no thought when obtaining loans as to how those loans might get paid back after graduation. But, students are not the only ones to blame. Where are the parents of these students? And, perhaps even more culpable, are the lenders. Why are they not asking the student this very question before the loan is made and refusing to make the loan if the student doesn't have a good answer or repayment plan?

The notion that lenders ought to be responsible for certifying that, under some standard, a potential loan is being made to one for whom the loan is suitable and who has a reasonable ability to repay the loan, is not so strange. As I recall from my days in Law School, when I studied to become a Registered Securities Salesman, there was a requirement that, before an investment account was opened, the salesman had to document that the prospective investor had the degree of sophistication to understand what the investment involved and that the investment was suitable for someone with the financial resources (e.g., earnings and net worth) evidenced by the potential investor. Why not the same for student loans?