Is Your Student Loan Safe?

Is Your Student Loan Safe?
Students Scramble to Secure New Loans as Dozens of Lenders Drop Out

I read this and I don't know what to say. Education is a great equalizer. We live in a world where the intellect of people around the globe is communicated in live-time, where goods and services go to the able, where the common currency of a good education is valued.

I take this as an opportunity to start planning well in advance, for those whom have, for those who had a game plan and pursued it as a family, for those who took out various loans, to meet the universal goal of wanting to achieve higher education; well I genuinely have empathy.

I took this wakeup call to ask a 15 year old to pick five colleges, to pick the best party colleges he could, picking Gainseville, Penn State, Ohio State, SSU, and RENO. I asked him to get the college weighted average of the freshman GPA and SAT score, as an example for FL 4.01 and 1300 respectively, and I asked him to keep track of which colleges he should drop from the list if his freshman grades in high-school preclude the admission standards.

I asked him to do this so I didn't have to break a foot up his @ss and we could become partners in planning college, so there was a realization that performance and attendance in the freshman year at high school mattered, that if you didn't achieve that that opportunity was delayed or denied. It is his list and I encouraged him to think big.

I have no idea how I would feel four years later if after making plans, meeting the benchmark, selecting a college, securing Plus loans, to have direct fall through!

This has warned me to have contingency plans and have him create them also.

But an opportunity delayed is an opportunity denied. I have genuine empathy for those who know the value of education and see the plan falling apart. I'm sort of irritated that those who abused the banking and mortgage, gamed the system, writing loans and bundling them as CDO's has made auctions of securities an endeavour in buying bundled doo doo..
I really think that the CEO's of the these bankrupt banks should be stripped of their personal assets. The idea that a 12th hour raise, million dollar a year salaries, seems to be in stark contrast to denying credit to tomorrows most promising asset today.

You know of course that a 15 year old owns nothing, no xbox 360, no cell phone for texting, no phone in the room, no internet, no CATV, nada.. nothing.. if his grades fall below what is required for the colleges he chooses.

The same should be true of the CEO's of banks that go bankrupt.

It is a contract that is sacred, and I genuinely feel for the people who intended to deliver, made a family covenant, and had the rug pulled from underneath them despite the plans and approval of associated types of loans.

They should teach the freshman class at college this year what happened and why the loans evaporated. They should ask these kids how it feels and if they will choose to treat the next generation as this one has treated them? There is no external threat as nefarious as an indiference to the generation that follows. There should be a billborad campaign to list the names of those along with their photos who piloted bankrupt lending.

Yeah I'll not hesitate to break a foot in the @ss of a kid in need of an education, but what I would really like to do is break my foot in the @ss of some of the banks that packaged the crap that we now all CDO's.

I hope they do teach the kids the truth.. otherwise