Well well what do we have here?

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.”

Sold it eh?  Kind of like a drug pusher sells his dope, right?

The "benefits" (you'll get high) are always mentioned but the costs (your teeth will rot out or you'll have a heart attack!) aren't.  In this case you'll get a degree (ok), but whether you'll get a job and whether your job will make the payments affordable are, well, not quite as fairly discussed.

But its roots are in fact deep, and the cast of contributing characters — including college marketing officers, state lawmakers wielding a budget ax and wide-eyed students and families — has been enabled by a basic economic dynamic: an insatiable demand for a college education, at almost any price, and plenty of easy-to-secure loans, primarily from the federal government.

Hmmm.... "easy money" chases goods and services and what happens?  The price goes up!

Duh.

And are the risks fairly disclosed?

Much like the mortgage brokers who promised pain-free borrowing to homeowners just a few years back, many colleges don’t offer warnings about student debt in the glossy brochures and pitch letters mailed to prospective students. Instead, reading from the same handbook as for-profit colleges, they urge students not to worry about the costs. That’s because most students don’t pay full price.

Oh that's nice.

Ninety-four percent of students who earn a bachelor’s degree borrow to pay for higher education — up from 45 percent in 1993, according to an analysis by The New York Times of the latest data from the Department of Education. This includes loans from the federal government, private lenders and relatives.

This is what I said about the problem in Leverage (look to the right, click and buy):

With banks and the government smug in the knowledge that they could hound students forever, cheap, below-market interest rate loans showed up literally everywhere, including direct government subsidized programs such as the Stafford student loan. The flood of cheap money caused more people to apply to go to college than there were slots in colleges for incoming freshmen. That shortage of available student capacity caused colleges to construct new buildings, renovate dorms and, of course, raise prices. The basic economics of supply and demand asserted themselves as the creation of artificial demand through cheap money policies drove prices higher. This was all to everyone’s benefit since we now had more students going to college, right?

Not quite.

....

Our young people are frequently deceived by various counselors and there’s no evidence that the High Schools in this nation spend any amount of time on this subject. There is no clear disclosure in the various financial aid packages explaining how to work the financial ratios that apply to these loan programs and what happens to you when you graduate with a mountain of student debt and the likely salary range you will have to pay it back with. There is even less disclosure about the fact that such a debt load will make you instantly ineligible for a standard home mortgage.

....

We should not accept our youth remaining uninformed of the fact that if they go into debt for their college education that debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy due to the very lenders and schools demanding special status under the law.

That's an excerpt, but you get the point.

Don't do it.

Incidentally, the full article linked above is well-worth reading.  The mainstream media may be very late on this (Leverage was published in November of 2011 and I've been writing on this for years) but this is one of the first times I've seen an actual mainstream media piece in which the institutions involved in funneling the students into the colleges -- the schools themselves and various counselors and departments -- are fingered as part of the problem.

It's about damn time.