May 10, 2017

By Charles Hugh Smith

Student loan lenders are skimming tens of billions in profits guaranteed by the taxpayers.

“Legal” rackets have two essential components: a public-relations “cover” that obscures the racket and the mechanism that extracts the wealth from the “marks.” The Higher Education Racket qualifies on both counts:

1. The PR cover is “you all need a college diploma, and we’re here to make that happen.” Yea for more education!

2. The extraction mechanism is student loans. Here’s a chart that shows what happened relatively recently: your federal government began guaranteeing obscene profits to student-loan lenders and debt-serfdom for tens of millions of “marks” i.e. students.

Source: How Higher Education Became an Obscenely Profitable Racket That Enriches the Few at the Expense of the Many (Student Debt-Serfs) [w/ VIDEO] | Galactic Connection

(Shaun Bradley) The Department of Education recently released a memo admitting that repayment rates on student loans have been grossly exaggerated. Data from 99.8% of schools across the country has been manipulated to cover up growing problems with the $1.3 trillion in outstanding student loans. New calculations show that more than half of all borrowers from 1,000 different institutions have defaulted on or not paid back a single dollar of their loans over the last seven years.

Source: America’s Problem with Student Loans Is Much Bigger Than Anybody Realized | Stillness in the Storm