The rule of thumb, for at least the last decade, has been that your total amount of loans shouldn't exceed what you can reasonably expect to gross in your first year employed in that field in a job with a reasonably large number of openings. For many people, that means $30-$40k, tops. Sure, the job market can shift drastically while you're still in school, but you pretty much always have the option to change majors - there isn't a severe time penalty unless you're close to finishing your degree, by which point, a drastic shift is usually unlikely or should have been easy to predict already. I discounted a large number of schools because they didn't follow this rule of thumb, and ended up with loans that were just a little more than my first year's salary, which I paid off in just under three years - in 2013, so I don't think it's too outdated.

We had "US Government" in New York. It did a decent job of teaching about the roles of the top levels of the Federal government, but absolutely nothing about the different departments, about state or local government (which, imo, are even more important to know about), or about current issues. About the closest to something relevant that we did was a mock trial of a drunk driver, which of course nobody took seriously.

You seem to think that college is the ONLY way to make a decent living. It's not. Not by a long shot. It's still entirely possible to work your way up from the figurative mail room. You may run into a wall at some point fairly high up the ladder, but by then you can probably pay for college in cash.

Or you can work one of any number of "dirty" jobs that pay well just because they suck, either because they're dangerous, or because they're just shitty (sometimes literally) jobs.

Or you can go to a trade school. Become an electrician, a plumber, a carpenter or any one of dozens of jobs like those. Here's a little secret - for every person that goes to college because, like you, they think they need to, that's one more trade position that opens up, driving up demand for workers and driving up wages for those increasingly rare workers.

So yeah, a little personal responsibility would go a long way towards averting both this and the home loan crisis. People need to do their own research and not just listen to whomever is selling you something. If you expect someone to do their research when buying a vacuum, why not when buying a car? A house? An education?

The reason you see those commercials probably isn't so much that the college as a whole is targeting the been-out-of-school crowd, but because that's the crowd that needs convincing. High school grads are already convinced to go to college, so they're already actively seeking out the colleges and don't need to be advertised to. There are predatory colleges out there, but it's not *all* of them like many people seem to think.

I agree that the main failing is in high school. There's too much focus on "preparation for college" - which, as it turns out, has nothing to do with college - and absolutely nothing about life skills, particularly financial. Perhaps if we revamped high school, we wouldn't have so much trouble with college loans in the first place, and we'd have skills to help with all of those other pesky financial situations as an adult.

Our high school economics class did have us balance a checkbook... a skill I've never actually needed in this electronic age. My state college, however, had a mandatory one-credit class that was basically a "life skills" class - loans, mortgages, credit cards, buying a car, buying a house, family finance planning, etc. Unfortunately, only the IT majors were required to take it. That shit really should have been covered in high school.

I can't speak for the politics, but a lot of state schools spend way too much money on extracurriculars, such as sports. For the very small number of major state colleges that do earn a profit off sports, that's ok. However, for community colleges and most smaller four year state schools, sports is a money pit. The problem isn't so much cutting funding as it is cutting funding in the wrong places. Not long after I graduated, the small ag/tech school I went to spent $5 million on revamping the football stadium. The end result looks like a diseased wart, and it somehow hasn't helped our team, which continues it's success ratio of winning one or two games a year. Either way, state schools are still cheaper than private schools, and many offer decent scholarship packages as well.

Holy shit does University of California have a horrid website. It's like Geocities had a bastard child with sulphuric acid and jizzed it in my eyes.

That said, California is the gold standard for the government fucking things up, which it looks like they did for tuition too. She may want to consider an out-of-state school that offers low out-of-state tuition - an increasing number of them charge the same as in-state residents - or an online school.

As for room and board, that's a trickier comparison. If she's living on her own, you'd have to compare it to the cost of renting an apartment and buying your own food. Around here, that's be around $8000/yr, but that can easily be $20,000 depending on where you are. The odd thing I noticed is that University of California estimates $14,000 room and board on-campus and $9,300 off-campus. That's a 50% increase! It's like they're not even trying to look like a good deal.

California sucks (well, the government).

What I find disturbing is that at age 18, we're allowed to go to war, vote, enter contracts and do just about anything (except drink alcohol... that's another weird one). Yet, we still seem to treat these same 18-year-olds like children when it comes to them understanding the loans that they voluntarily enter into. I never found loans to be a difficult concept. You borrow money now, you pay it back later with interest.

If you don't want massive loans, pick a state school. There's a lot of state schools that offer in-state tuition rates to out-of-state students, in addition to your own state's schools. There are a lot of choices without picking private for-profit schools. Now, there might be some more niche degrees only offered by a limited number of colleges, but those are much, much more fewer than the number of students who claim to be victimized by student loans.

I'm not saying that *no* colleges have predatory loan practices, or that *no* students are victimized. I'm just saying that a great deal of students who claim to be victimized are experiencing something closer to buyer's remorse at the first major, adult decision. Some of the blame for the student loan situation *should* sit with the students who entered into these agreements.

"a sun" and "The Sun" mean two different things. "A sun" is essentially the same as saying "A star". However, "The Sun" is clearly identifying a particular star - the one we orbit around. Although "the" is a big indicator, the fact that it's a proper noun (note the capitalization) is what really gives it away. Sol is another name for the Sun, just like Terra is another name for Earth. Similarly, "a moon" could mean any of dozens of moons, but "the Moon" specifically refers to Earth's moon, also known as Luna.

So what you're saying is that I'm a ... MACHO man? Maybe even a macho MACHO man?

Also, interesting reads.

It's pretty clear in the definition that "Sun" is a proper noun denoting, specifically, the star that we orbit.

A lot of physicists, including Neil deGrasse Tyson, have said that "Dark Matter" is actually a pretty poor name for the phenomenon because it's almost certainly not just some exotic form of matter, but something else entirely that's at work. However, like many things in science, the early name was catchy enough to stick in spite of being a crappy descriptor.

By that definition, there's only 8 planets in the entire Universe. They may need to update their definition of planet, especially the first point.

Planets are made of matter, matter is a gravity source. If that matter pulls together, but fails to ignite, you have a gas giant instead of a star. The same could happen with rocky planets. Obviously, smaller planets would take much longer to form on their own, but it could happen. And even more likely is that the planets form inside of a star system, but are ejected rather than settling into a stable orbit.