The Wall Street Journal recently did an in-depth report on students who have taken on massive debt for master’s degrees only to end up working menial jobs. This is absolutely criminal.The WSJ piece is behind a paywall, but The College Fix posted excerpts:
‘Financially hobbled for life’: The elite master’s degrees that don’t pay offAs calls to “cancel” student debt continue unabated, the Wall Street Journal recently ran an investigative piece looking at schools who are baiting students into taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of loans by promising them payoffs that never happen.The WSJ targeted Columbia University, which has issued “thousands of master’s degrees that don’t provide graduates enough early career earnings to begin paying down their federal student loans,” according to the story:
Lured by the aura of degrees from top-flight institutions, many master’s students at universities across the U.S. took on debt beyond what their pay would support, the Journal analysis of federal data on borrowers found. At Columbia, such students graduated from programs including history, social work and architecture.
Specifically, the WSJ looked at Columbia University’s film studies graduate department, and the students that ended up with loans they could never repay:
“As a poor kid and a high-school dropout, there was an attraction to getting an Ivy League master’s degree,” said Mr. Clement, 41. He graduated in 2020 from Columbia, borrowing more than $360,000 in federal loans for the degree. He is casting for an independent film, he said. To pay the bills, he teaches film at a community college and runs an antique shop.Columbia grad students who borrowed money typically held loans that exceeded annual earnings two years after graduation in 14 of the school’s 32 master’s degree programs tracked by the Education Department, the Journal found. In about a dozen Columbia master’s programs, the majority of recent graduates weren’t repaying the principal on their loans or took forbearance, according to data released for the first time this year.
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