The College Fix

The New York Times latest series on student debt begins with the story of Kelsey Griffith, who owes $120,000 in student loans. Griffith is written as someone we should pity, because of this crippling burden she must pay. Indeed, it’s a sad story:

ADA, Ohio — Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.

“If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Ms. Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith.

Ms. Griffith, 23, wouldn’t seem a perfect financial fit for a college that costs nearly $50,000 a year. Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.

“As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” said Ms. Griffith, a marketing major. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”

But doesn’t the blame rest squarely on Griffith’s own shoulders? No one forced her to choose an extremely expensive college. No one forced her to take out the loans. Did she not bother to read what she was signing up for?

Certainly, other people deserve some blame, too. Her mother should have realized what foolishness this was. And staff members at Northern Ohio who “urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price” behaved contemptibly. But ultimately, this is a problem of Griffith’s own making.

Sure, she was only 18 at the time. But if society considers her old enough to vote, drive, live by herself, and study college-level academic material, I have a hard time believing we should also consider her mentally unready to manage her finances. The truth is that students who took out massive loans to attend super-expensive colleges, rather than affordable ones, bought into a deal that was too good to be true.

But college administrators and advisers who peddle expensive programs–especially those who urge enrollment in the very fields that do not tend toward employment–are in desperate need of a reality check.

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