Quote from Chicago_CTA:
Mayhem, I agree with most of what you wrote. I googled her name and the NYT article appeared.
Seeing the picture of an overweight, middle-aged white woman with a cat surfing the net in a futile attempt to stay fed is...well, sad. Quite sad.
But it's true she bought a bill of goods when she shouldn't have known better. She doesn't exactly look like the MBA type and $92,000 for an IONA degree is a joke.
While she was making $52,000 per year she should have been saving money, and while in her 4th or 5th or maybe....10th week of Unemployment, she should've taken a lower paying position. One can't claim nobody's hiring; there are ads on craigslist and elsewhere!!!
Basically she made some terrible choices, and others are making these choices as well.
At the heart of our society is the FALSEHOOD that happiness and success comes from CONSUMPTION. I do well enough and I *hate* buying things (ask my g/f 
) because I know capital is to SAVE, INVEST and maybe create jobs with (currently I enjoy being a one-man operation!).
Americans are a sad bunch because they don't acknowledge & practice two principles:
#1: Cash flow is king. ($$$ going out; $$$ going in)
#2: 90% of your income BEYOND your normal living expenses should be saved and invested.
I hope every American young enough to benefit from this advice heeds it.
Thanks for the interesting post.
--The Chicago CTA
IMO you are missing the point. It wasn't extravagant consumption that did her in. She didn't blow 90k on a Ferrari or as downpayment on a Miami penthouse condo. She was spending it on an education, something that has been promoted by most elements in society as the responsible thing to do. No doubt she realised, just like you and mayhem did, that in her mid 40s she was not getting any more employable. So she took what she thought was the responsible option, and got further education. Not a degree in musicology or women's studies, not one in ancient history or sanskrit, but a further business degree.
Her fault was not to seek an education, but to be snowed by fraudulent con artists into blowing 90k on a mostly worthless piece of paper that wouldn't pass as an education in any other country on the planet. No different to an old person being smooth-talked out of their life savings by a slick cold-calling salesman, or a gullible person falling for a 401k or phishing scam - except in one crucial element: the 401k scammer, the phishing hacker, and the boiler room operator are all currently classed as criminals and would be hunted down and locked up for a long time for their crimes. Whereas the "college" in this crime is given huge taxpayer subsidies and an official stamp of approval while it goes about ruining gullible peoples lives for profit.
Did her college explain to her the likely value of her degree, before she signed up? A bit like a good fund manager or financial advisor would explain the risk and reward in stocks before you invest? Or did they just BS her with a fraudulent sales pitch full of lies? I think we all know the answer to that.
The current for-profit college education boom is a bubble, just like condos were a bubble, and just like tech stocks were a bubble. It is based around taking people's life savings by smooth-talking and conning them into paying high prices for near-worthless junk, or buying actual quality but paying 3 or 4 times too much for it. It is simply exploiting the gullibility of non-experts for mercenary gain.
If someone sells me a tin of beans and it says 100g on the outside, but only has 25g inside, then that's a crime. Why is it any different when finances, housing, or education are involved?
At least dot.com speculators and condo flippers were operating out of pure greed, so one can say caveat emptor for them and shed no tears. But just as genuine savers got raped by the 2000 bubble in stocks, just as genuine home buyers got raped by the housing bubble, so genuine students who are trying to improve their skills and career prospects are getting raped by the current for-profit education bubble.
A lot of people are still stuck with this idea that it is ok to rape people in a bubble, to ruin lives and steal life savings by blatant lying, which in any other field would be prosecuted as fraud; not only that, but to turn a blind eye when an industry connives to corrupt politicians to change the laws to make such exploitation even more profitable, turning law enforcement and the courts into de facto hired goons for flim flam artists. After two such bubbles and crashes in under a decade, you'd have thought people would have realised by now. Perhaps the forthcoming bust in for-profit education will be the final wake-up call that makes people realise something has to change.
