Greece to Leave the Euro Zone

[ag]

Not if they didn't go to college

Are you suggesting that those who did not go to college should be wards of the state?

Im suggesting that a child trying to finance college may have parents who didn't go to college and thus don't have any rubric to make a judgment on when considering the where and how much.

He has school councelors, teachers, etc., etc.

[ag]

*For the record, and not to get too personal, that is in fact the exact road I went down (going to an expensive school that was particularly well-known for producing PhD students, with an eye towards becoming one myself), though I realized too late that academia was not going to happen for me.  Ergo I very much don't exactly take kindly to the suggestion that I deserve debtor's prison for decisions I made when I was 16/having to change gears.  Thanks.

Well, I, actually, went to a non-prestigeous private undergraduate residential college, which would have been expensive, but I got a scholarship (I was not even eligible for any of those nice loans, being a foreigner - and I had exactly no money to pay cash). Out of, literally, thousands of students in my graduating class, exactly 3 went for a ph.d. (and that was considered a very successful year in this respect). Nobody had gone for a Ph.D. in my field from that school in years. It was not at all a problem getting admitted to a good grad school - with full funding. You do NOT have to go to a prestigeous undergraduate school to get to a pretty good doctorate program. You just have to be decent and know what you want.

Anyway, if you want to go for a ph.d. in economics in the US, just learn Spanish and come down for your undergraduate to us here in Mexico. We charge less than USD$10 grand a year and send more students for a US ph.d. than all but a handful schools in the world. And living costs here are low

[ag]

Another thing: if every one in the middle class took ag's advice and only went to cheap state schools (which, BTW, are getting less and less cheap by the year), those expensive private schools would become even more a preserve of the 1% than they already are.  The negative ramifications of that shift for social mobility and society at large are left as an exercise for the reader.

I do not know of many Harvard grads who suffer so much paying out their debts: Harvard degree is money (and, in any case, if you do struggle you are not doing much for social mobility). Most poor souls who paid fortune for college and struggle with debts went to very different kinds of schools. No disparagement intended, but I see no reason to borrow so much in order to attend Hofstras and Adelphis of this world.

[ag]

The most important thing right now is to make sure humanitarian aid is given to the Greek populace. The next few months will be very difficult, until the new currency is operational.