Sunday, October 07, 2007

Will the Rising Use of Student Loans Hurt the Economy?

There is an interesting article by Marcy Gordon of the Associated Press called Student loans sow seeds of economic ills. The amount of money students are borrowing to pay ever rising tuition costs is also growing rapidly. For some the monthly payment is more than a mortgage.

But I think the part where they think the economy will be hurt is:

"Many in the next generation of workers will be so debt-burdened they will have to delay home purchases, limit vacations, even eat out less to pay loans off on time."

Maybe we should not be too concerned about this. They will pay the money back to someone, who in turn will spend it. It will just mean that the former students will be consuming fewer goods and others, the ones doing the lending right now, will consume more (right now they are consuming less than they could since they are lending money to students). This does not seem to be hurting the economy right now. We have not had a recession since 2001 and the unemployment rate is 4.7%.

1 comment:

champ said...

Being a current college student, this is kind of scary. I don't want to think that i am going to forgo living a good life just to pay back loans. I guess it is really on the student that takes that loan. In this situation, it pays to be a Veteran. This almost sounds like a Survival of the Fittest situation.