An offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Strike Debt/Rolling Jubilee, has freed another 2,000 student borrowers from the crushing weight of student loan debt, according to their latest news release.

For a growing number of college students, leaving school swimming in debt is the new normal. The average student owes about $30,000 in student loan debt. But that number is often higher at for-profit colleges like Everest, which enroll only 13% of all college students but account for 31% of outstanding student debt and about half of all loan defaults.

The Rolling Jubilee Fund, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit formed by Strike Debt to carry out its mission, cancelled roughly 2,700 students’ debt, at an average of $1,400 per person.

However, in an article in Salon by Kyle Schmidlin digs into the seemingly impossible task that organizations like Strike Debt face. In the article, Kyle delves into the issue of it taking some 40,000 years to pay off the current student loan debt of over 1 trillion dollars. He also goes on to talk about how the government is actually profiting off of students in debt to the tune of 127 billion dollars over the next 10 years, making student loan debt a huge profit center for the government, and a debt in which can never be forgiven by any means other than paying it off.

I take issue with corporations who have stated time and again that in order to qualify for an entry level job one must be a graduate of college first, or be left out of work or with work that is menial only. The problem with that is that our current youth population doesn’t really allow for everyone of them to go to college and get a degree and hope to get a job in the general market. Corporations by and large are not hiring that many people, and as a matter of fact if everyone went to college to get a degree there would not be enough jobs to cover them all.

So what happens next is that those students who graduated end up working in near slave-like conditions at low end service jobs, only now they have crushing student loan debts that they can never pay. So in a lot of ways this indentured servitude is what people who go to college actually find themselves in. And because students cannot get out of the loans by filing bankruptcy, they will find those loans stuck to them like glue, all while cheesy politicians talk about lowering interest rates to give those in debt a helping hand. Sadly though those very rates will just go back up later on down the road, so interest rate lowering will actually not help them for very long.

Enter in organizations like Strike Debt and their Rolling Jubilee (501)c4 who are out buying up this debt for pennies on the dollar and then forgiving those loans so the students can get out from under this crushing weight of lifetime debt. Yet, for all the posturing on all sides of the aisle, the reality is that these very organizations can only do so much, and even if they could do more it would take over 40,000 years to get rid of it all. That is of course if they start now and all student loan debt was halted on this very day. So for now it seems that if one can get these organizations to help them then it’s a luck-of-the-draw type of thing. Money is of course donated to these organizations, and as such, most of that money will eventually run dry, which will in effect shut down said organizations when they cannot get any more funds to work with. For now I suggest donating to these worthy causes, for this type of debt is as corrupt as the corporations that made up all these job hiring rules in the first place.

http://strikedebt.org/

http://rollingjubilee.org/

 

By Marcus Crassus

Marcus Licinius Crassus was a Roman general and politician who played a key role in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.

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