Leading People On By Those Who Should Know Better
Leading someone on is a kind of con, and here's a version of it most people never stop to examine. Count the number of college degrees floating around that turned out to be worth very little. Think about how much student loan money is owed that nobody can realistically pay back in an economy like this one. You probably know at least one person stuck in exactly that spot. I can name several.
Colleges, and the financial aid offices attached to them, are running this con whether they mean to or not. A degree used to come with the promise of decent work. Now it guarantees nothing, sometimes not even employment. And nobody is keeping honest numbers on the graduates who simply quit looking for work. What about the ones piecing together part-time hours, or standing behind a register at minimum wage? Then there are the people holding jobs that never required a degree in the first place, often in fields with no connection to what they studied. And the parents who stay home with the kids, degree in hand, because no job they can find would cover the cost of childcare anyway.
The scam works the way all such scams do: promises get made and then not kept. Students are nudged toward taking on far more debt than their future income can absorb. Call it a truth-in-advertising problem if you like. We watched the same thing play out in housing, when people were steered into mortgages larger than they could carry. It's grim enough that so many graduates land jobs paying barely enough to live on. On top of that subsistence wage sits a mountain of loan debt waiting to be repaid.
Is there any ethical line being crossed here? Lending money to someone who, by any reasonable forecast, will never manage to repay it. Selling an education that returns nothing on what was spent to get it. Somebody in these offices should know better.