Personally I feel that this county needs Student Loan Reform every bit as much as it needs Health Care Reform. Talk about an abuse of the system! First of all, there are Student Loans available for just every about everything you can think of. Rather than list all of the useless courses that the Government is more than willing to fund, I’ll just pick one; a course in Cosmetology.
Every young girl wants to go to Beauty College. Granted, these colleges deliver; they teach their students what they need to know about hair, make-up and nails, but what they don’t tell them is that the only chance they have to make any money at all, let alone make a living in the field of cosmetology is if they have the ways and means to open up their own salon and rent out booth space to other cosmetologists. Something else they fail to mention is clientele.
Your clientele is your bread and butter. No clientele, no income, and it is not easy to get clientele either. A salon owner is solely responsible for everything that does and doesn’t happen in their salons. If one of their employees happens to ruin someone’s hair, it all falls back on the salon owner. This is why someone fresh out of beauty college is extremely hard pressed to find a salon owner that will hire them; that and the fact that they have no clientele to bring with them. I know that twenty years ago, booth space was going for $30.00 a day plus the commission they had to pay the Salon Owner for every operation they preformed.
I have known numerous girls who have gone through beauty college and never managed to make a living from it. Only one girl, who had a husband that was smart enough to build her a Salon while she was still in college and outfit it with everything she would need to go directly into business as soon as she passed State Board and actually managed to make a living with the trade she had learned. She had ten booths to rent out and it mattered not how much these Women who rented those booths made, she got her $30.00 a day from them plus a 15% commission on every dollar they brought into her Salon.
And the thing about student ;oans is that you don’t have to start paying them back in monthly installments until six months after you become employed and most Cosmetology Students are still unemployed six months later. And what happens when these girls get a loan and default on them? Interest starts to occur and just continues to occur. Long story short, most Student Loans that are given to cosmetology students never gets repaid and their credit immediately gets a big black mark against it, making it impossible for them to return to College and get another Student Loan for a course that they could actually find employment as soon as they graduate and be able to repay those Student Loans on. Also, it takes the average Student ten years to fully repay those student loans unless they double or triple up on their payments to their Lenders.
I feel that Student Loans should only be given to Students who will get the proper training in courses that will immediately make it possible for them to become game fully employed so that they can make a living and actually afford to repay those Student Loans on time.
Cosmetology is only one of many courses students can get loans for that will take them nowhere.
The Lenders need to revamp their system and redefine what courses they will provide Student Loans for. There are many fields in the job market that don’t have enough qualified people to fill all of the positions they have available. Nurses will always be in demand, as will Computer related jobs, and these jobs afford the students the chance to make a decent living and be able to repay their loans on time as well. If someone applies for a Student Loan that has a long history of going nowhere, those applications should be denied and a list of courses that have a high potential for employment immediately after they get their credentials should then be given to them to choose from. At least this way they will have a fighting chance to make a go of it with what they’ve learned, support themselves and be able to repay their student Loans and maintain a good credit standing.
Most of the time, it is not the students fault that this happens to them. They have high hopes and dreams of a glamorous future doing something they’ll love. The problem is that nobody takes the time to show them the ugly statistics regarding their employment future, and I feel by law that this should be a requirement before handing out a student loan to anyone applying for one. Just a thought.