Roughly one third of college students spend their loans on spring break and partying.
- 6 Comment
There is a massive student loan epidemic in the United States. Over $1.4 trillion in student debt is floating around in our economy lingering like an albatross on the necks of many young students. While the idea of getting a college degree is more popular today than ever, it would seem like going to spring break is also very popular. It is hard to track how students spend their student loans. Obviously most (if not all) goes to pay for college for the vast majority of students. But some use student loans to finance unnecessary items like partying it up on spring break and getting inebriated to celebrate a semester well done. A new LendEDU poll found that roughly one-third of college students used a part of their student loans to finance their spring break. While this is not the bulk of young college going Americans, the number is somewhat startling. Priorities folks!
Spending student debt for partying
There is absolutely value in going to college if done right. Yet using debt to act out a cliché spring break party scene for one week is just nuts. This is really bad planning and does very little aside from giving you a major hangover and hopefully only minor regrets after and a hefty bill once you graduate college.
Take a look at some details here:
“According to the LendEDU poll, 30.60% of college students with student debt claim that they are using money they received from student loans to help pay for their spring break trip this year. For reference, you can use student loan funding for living expenses.
The National Center for Education Statistics calculated that 20.5 million students will be attending college this year in the United States. Orbitz reported that 55% of students will be going on spring break. Using this data, we can roughly calculate that 11,275,000 students will be going on spring break this year. And, it is estimated that 69% of all current college students use student loan debt by the time of graduation. By doing some additional arithmetic, we can calculate that roughly 7,779,750 student debtors are going on spring break this year.
Factoring in our data, and assuming the claims made in our survey are accurate, this means that 2.38 million students are using money received from student loans to pay for their spring break excursion this year.â€
This is simply crazy. Keep in mind that student loans are given out based on the cost of going to college but also associated living costs. So many students take on additional debt beyond tuition to finance things like well, spring break. That is not smart and you get an automatic “F†in financial planning if you do this. Or for example buying a $2,000 MacBook. 18 to 22 year olds simply do not realize how much this is going to cost them in the long run. And that is why the student debt mountain looks like this:
This is a runaway problem. And there are clear ways to remedy this. For example, putting a cap on where the money can be spent. Whatever funds are not used for tuition essentially become like a giant credit card for students that have no income coming in. And the grim reality is, at least based on recent figures, half of college graduates are working in jobs where degrees are not necessary. The wages that many are earning simply does not come to the level needed to pay off these giant levels of debt. And that is why the most delinquent loan class in America today is with student debt:
You can feel bad for students going to college trying to do the right thing and simply not realizing how bad paying back the debt was going to be. But those using student loans for spring break? It is hard to feel sympathy here.
If you enjoyed this post click here to subscribe to a complete feed and stay up to date with today’s challenging market!
If you enjoyed this post click here to subscribe to a complete feed and stay up to date with today’s challenging market!  6 Comments on this post
Trackbacks
-
Big Blue said:
Using a reptilian brain, you would assume that everyone going on spring break is heading to the beaches of Florida like in the picture. I did that one year, but I also opened a camp for underprivileged kids in the Appalachians in Kentucky another year. By your measure, using loan money to pay for a hotel one night or gas to drive down there would still mean I am equivalent to the spring break partiers.
Just because students are borrowing money for going to college and then heading to spring break doesn’t mean they are blowing it all like projectile vomit from an evening of heavy drinking at a frat party. They might need to blow off steam for a week after midterms.
Maybe they are headed to a place like Antigua, Guatemala to a language school, like a lot of kids, and learning Spanish in an intensive course, something that makes them more marketable in job interviews.
The biggest issue isnt that they are spending $1200 on a long week on spring break. It’s that tuition has gotten so out of control. State cutbacks for subsidizing college replaced in favor of tax cuts for the rich and old means we have a generation of kids who will be up to their eyeballs in debt, and won’t be buying homes or new cars anytime soon. Putting a cap on where money is spent when they are paying interest on that money? Ridiculous.
I took that same Florida beach trip when my school charged $7K out of state tuition. My school now charges $46K out of state tuition, yet I doubt the trip costs that much more in today’s dollars than it did in 1987.
What about the federal student loans where the government is making as much as private banks in loaning money, charging high rates to our kids? Even in state tuition and living expenses at $28K/year means that your $1200 trip is 4% of the annual costs to attend school, yet you really should stay focused on the other 96%.
Way to deflect away from where the real problems are.
March 13th, 2017 at 11:44 pm -
patrick Trussell said:
This is usury on children . The Zionist continue their attack on the west .
March 14th, 2017 at 5:35 am -
FWG said:
One thing that sticks out to me from my experience is that students were not given even the most rudimentary of financial advice during school. There was no class a la home economics, shop, etc. that taught us balancing a checkbook, compound interest, etc. A lot of these students, if not taught at home, are probably just as clueless about money as I was.
March 14th, 2017 at 6:40 am -
NOway said:
And these losers expect govt/taxpayers to wipe out their loans? Even if they were just spending it on college, too bad so sad…pay your own debts!
March 17th, 2017 at 2:40 pm -
Patrick Trussell..Nazi Troll said:
Patrick Trussell aka Goebbels…take your anit-Semitic trolling elsewhere.
Unless you want me to take you to the Tuesday night world banking conspiracy meetings, or the Wednesday night media control meetings so you can meet all my friends!
Tinfoil hats supplied!!!
March 19th, 2017 at 11:25 pm -
dc - The Everyday Capitalist said:
College and the American university system is a fraud. Liars and political whores use the taxpayer like they own them to continue what is another ‘great American lie’ – that if you go to school, ease and wealth will drop into your lap like money falling off a tree.
I started to actively save for college when I entered junior high school and worked at everything from cutting grass, shoveling snow, running three paper routes, managing a Clark service station, construction and maybe the hardest job of all – appreciating the value of my labor and discipline to Almighty God’s will, rather than accepting every Marxist lie.
By the end of my junior year of high school I had saved enough to pay my way through four years at the university – room and board, books and tuition and some mo’. So I could think and learn and ready myself to fully shoulder my word in all things I would give it.
My parents could have written the check any day of the week and never missed it, instead I wrote the check and learned enough that I have never worked at a ‘good paying job’ since I earned my degree.
No salary/wage and debt slavery for me.
If every American pulled their own weight instead of eating their way through the land of milk and honey at anyone else’s expense except their own:
1. We would enjoy an unimaginable standard of living never owing a dime to usurers.
2. Our children would stand for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness like Noah, John the Baptist, Charles Martel and Stonewall Jackson stood again the enemies of God himself – like, well, a stonewall.
3. And, our land would not be filled with idiots living only to die with the disease of debt.
March 20th, 2017 at 12:20 am