Student Loan Debt Hell: Statistics That May Make You Rethink College

Not that I would have done anything differently with my education, but knowing this information I may have done things just a lil bit differently

• Since 1978, the cost of college tuition in the United States has gone up by over 900 percent.
• In 2010, the average college graduate had accumulated approximately $25,000 in student loan debt by graduation day.
• Approximately two-thirds of all college students graduate with student loans.
• Americans have accumulated well over $900 billion in student loan debt. That figure is higher than the total amount of credit card debt in the United States.
• According to very extensive research detailed in a new book entitled “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses”, 45 percent of U.S. college students exhibit “no significant gains in learning” after two years in college.
• Today, college students spend approximately 50% less time studying than U.S. college students did just a few decades ago.
• 50% of U.S. college students have never taken a class where they had to write more than 20 pages.
• U.S. college students spend 24% of their time sleeping, 51% of their time socializing and 7% of their time studying.
• Nearly half of all the graduate science students enrolled at colleges and universities in the United States are foreigners.
• According to the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate for college graduates younger than 25 years old was 9.3 percent in 2010.
• One-third of all college graduates end up taking jobs that don’t even require college degrees.
• In the United States today, over 18,000 parking lot attendants have college degrees.
• In the United States today, 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees.
• In the United States today, approximately 365,000 cashiers have college degrees.
• Once they get out into the “real world”, 70% of college graduates wish that they had spent more time preparing for the “real world” while they were still in school.
• Approximately 14 percent of all students that graduate with student loan debt end up defaulting within 3 years of making their first student loan payment.

(Read More: Zero Hedge)