- I'm guessing you've heard of the acclaimed TV show Game of Thrones.
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- Seven kingdoms vying for power, plots within plots, watch your back or lose your head. It's great.
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- But you've probably never heard of a real life drama that I call the Game of Loans.
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- That's a game Washington politicians play on young people, that is, college students, every day.
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- Just like Game of Thrones, the Game of Loans has plots within plots, big winners and big losers.
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- The winners are politicians and colleges.
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- They fool students into thinking that by generously providing
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- ever-larger college loans to cover ever-larger tuition costs,
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- they have earned student's votes at election time.
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- Why do I say students are fooled?
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- Because it is thanks to the very politicians
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- who promise students more and more aid
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- in league with the colleges that college tuition became so expensive in the first place.
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- Here's how the game works.
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- According to Bloomberg News, since 1978,
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- the cost of a college education has gone up by over 1000 percent.
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- Way past the rate of inflation.
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- Tuition alone at many colleges is 20, 40, even 50 thousand dollars a year!
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- So, how do you pay for it?
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- Answer: student loans, loans that the government is happy to give you since they collect the interest.
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- You don't have to be a finance major to figure out that all these student loans
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- give colleges no incentive to cut costs.
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- Instead, it gives them every incentive to raise costs.
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- Higher tuition obviously means more money for the college.
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- Now students were going to college in record numbers
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- to study engineering or computer science or biology
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- professions with high employment rates
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- maybe these crazy sums would make some sense.
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- Maybe. But the most common majors are in the social sciences and communications
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- in subjects like sociology, cinema history and gender studies.
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- Not surprisingly these majors have very high unemployment rates, as in,
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- they don't prepare you for a job.
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- And these majors are mainstream!
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- You can get a degree in storytelling, bag piping and puppet arts for your fifty thousand a year.
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- But here's the point:
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- colleges are no longer primarily about preparing you for a career.
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- Today's higher education is about teaching you what a terrible country America is,
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- social activism and binge drinking.
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- Hey, if college didn't cost so much the parties might be worth it, but it does.
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- The average student loan debt in America is 28400 dollar per borrower.
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- Note that this is per borrower, not graduate!
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- Big difference. A large chunk of the one point three trillion dollar student loan liability
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- is held by ex-students who never graduated.
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- For every 100 students who enter a four-year college only 59 exit with a degree.
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- But maybe you're one of the lucky ones.
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- You got a business degree and you found a decent job.
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- Chances are you're paying off your student loans and will be for the next 10, 20 or even 30 years!
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- Good luck saving money for a down payment on a house or just about anything else.
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- Mike Rowe from the TV show Dirty Jobs
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- nicely summarized the issue this way:
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- We are lending money we don't have to kids who can't pay it back to train them for jobs that no longer exist.
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- So, am I saying that college is always a waste of time and money? Of course not.
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- But I am saying this:
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- One, remember that if you take out a student loan, it's not free money.
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- You actually have to pay it back.
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- I know this sounds ridiculously basic but it's also ridiculously important.
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- And since you owe this money to the federal government, you can't get out of it,
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- even if you declare bankruptcy.
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- Two, whenever you hear politicians say they want to make college more affordable,
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- what they're really saying
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- is that they want to get the youth vote while making it easier for you to dig yourself into a deep hole.
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- These politicians don't have your best interest at heart.
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- They have their own best interest at heart namely, getting elected.
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- You don't owe them anything.
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- The Game of Loans is rigged and not in your favor.
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- But if you're smart about your choices, you can beat the odds.
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- I'm Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA for Prager University.
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