It's kind of sad when you think about it. We need well educated people to make the world go 'round' - in fact most jobs can't be had these days without some type of schooling, yet we make it so tough for a student to make a go of it, is it any wonder we're crying for skilled workers?
The sheer cost of going to university makes it next to impossible for some students (who aren't lent a helping hand) to even conceive of that option without being willing to sacrifice an awful lot that is.
I was reading a story about a gal named Nereid Lake. Lake was a single mom with an undergraduate degree in French linguistics. She was on her way to a master's degree in linguistics when Canada Student Loans informed her she had exceeded the lifetime lending limit and would have to leave university - without her degree. At the time, she had accumulated about $60,000 in student loans. Wow! That's a lot of debt for a student to start out with, especially without her degree.
"Even though I had an arm load of academic awards, I was forced to leave," she says. "My aspiration was to work in the field of voice recognition cognitive science, getting computers to understand human language. Instead I had to take the first job I could, as a low-earning court clerk. Now I'm nearly 40 just barely making ends meet and I still owe more than $50,000 in student debt. I naively thought student loans would be the great equalizer. Instead I've plunged into a student debt nightmare."
And sadly Lake is far from being alone in her situation. According to statistics, nearly two million Canadians have student loans amounting to debt that is worth about $20-billion that includes federal and provincial government loans, personal debt in the form of credit cards, family loans and lines of credit - all used to finance post-secondary education. Stats also say that number is climbing as student loans (owed to the government of Canada alone) increase by $1.2-million a day. And with all that said, the amount of unrecoverable student loan debt is now sitting at a whopping $149.5-million.
That's not all... enter into the picture interest rates. The prime lending rate is currently at around three per cent at most financial institutions but students are forced to pay 550 basis points above that, or 8.5 per cent interest. Interest may not start accumulating until six months after a student leaves school but at these high rates, dollars owed can add up pretty quick. How is a student - degree or not - supposed to make a real go of it without getting discouraged?
While it's true as some point out, that nobody is forcing students to go into debt, what's the alternative if you want to get ahead in life?
It seems to me this is definitely an area the Harper government should be looking into as it enters into its next phase of leadership.
