An American teenager fled the country in 2011 to avoid repaying student loans he took out to complete a college education. This isn’t the first time this has happened, and it certainly won’t be the last.
Stories of crippling student loan debt are not new, however, the idea that one can escape their obligation to repay the money they’ve borrowed is a symptom of the massive irresponsibility running rampant in our culture and propagated on a daily basis. According to the New York Post, a Pennsylvania man bought a one-way ticket to China to leave his financial woes behind after four years of job searching has gotten him nowhere in the United States.
Of course, no one held a gun to this man’s head and forced him to take out loans.
The Hill recently reported that Trump’s “regulatory rollbacks” would boost the chances of another recession. Trump’s administration has been wiping out measures designed to prevent consumers from being ensnared in unsustainable debt and, at the same time, eliminating borrowers’ ability to seek court-ordered relief when they are.
Just because Trump removes some regulations doesn’t mean people will go out and overburden themselves with debt, and if they do, they should have to face the consequences. Personal responsibility would go far in ensuring we have a free society, however, it certainly seems like most Americans would simply rather have their decisions made for them and then blame others when they make a bad choice. –SHTFPlan
“I had to escape this debtors’ prison. It felt like there was no other choice,” Chad Albright told the York Daily Record. “That’s what America became to me, a prison. So I left.” But it was a prison of Albright’s own making. “I wanted that diploma, and I was willing to work for it,” Albright told the newspaper. “Everyone always told me it would be worth it.” But no one apparently explained that if you take someone else’s money and sign a contract saying you’ll repay it that eventually, they will come for their money. This really isn’t rocket science, but supposedly needs to still be explained.
After graduating with a degree in public relations in 2007, at the start of the Great Recession, Albright found to his dismay that job offers were not exactly pouring in.
During interviews, he said he heard the same line from prospective employers: “Sorry, there’s someone who’s been doing this for 10 years and just lost their job. I have to go with someone who has 10 years’ experience.”
He recalled: “But the last thing they would say to me, ‘Don’t worry, your day will come.’”
The despondent man moved back to parents’ place in Lancaster, where he said he fell into a deep depression.
“I was expected to make a $400 loan payment every month, but I had no money, no sustainable income. College ruined my life,” he said.
“Two years of nonstop interviews and nothing. I was so done.” –The New York Post
If he could do things over, he said he would have skipped the degree and taken a course online to learn about computer programming. “I’ve accepted that this is my life now,” Albright said. “College ruined my life to the fullest extent, and my life is a constant reminder of that.”
Albright is now a permanent resident in Ukraine working in sales and hasn’t checked his student loan balance in over eight years. “I’m happy to be away from my debt, but I’m lonely most of the time,” Albright said. “I don’t really have other options at this point, though,” the 39-year-old said.
It’s unfortunate that our society is doing a great disservice to those who chose to go to college. The government’s entrance into the student loan business exaggerated the prices to attend school and the constant bombardment of the sentiment that “you can’t get by without a college degree” is failing far too many.
Anthony O’Neal, the author of The Graduate Survival Guide offers great advice in his book for college students. It is the ultimate manual for students, identifying five mistakes to avoid making in college. These mistakes can lead to years of pain and expensive life lessons. As Anthony tells students, “The caliber of your future will be determined by the choices you make today.”
“Of course, no one held a gun to this man’s head and forced him to take out loans.”
You literally told us that survival would be untenable, any other way — except for spotty, menial labor, to an early death. If you’re lucky, it won’t look like an acute medical trauma.
If you have an inside line, through no blame of your own, some patron on dignified terms, I find no fault in that.
If you asked counselors and recruiters ordinary hiring sorts of questions, if they deferred and physically hid from you on campus, and you still tried this, anyway, I hope you are sent to North Korea for your punishment.
(I am a fit, formal employer with STEM honors at the local, as well as national, level. Be entitled. Show me, now, in writing, you graduates should be saying. Money talks. Are they bullshit. Financial equivalent of the sex test.)
I really don’t think much of “programmers”. I could train a 8th grader to program, better and cheaper than most of those college educated people. I know how to design computer languages, among other things to do with computing.
I strongly encourage all non-STEM degreed people that can’t repay their loans to leave the USA and don’t come back. It is worth the money to get rid of Democrat voters and possible politicians.
If you have an 8th grader, teach him to program or (fill-in-the-blank) skill.
Let me see, 8th grade.
age 13. GPA 3.5.
Algebra
Mandarin Chinese
Boat building
Metal shop
Car repair
Paper route
Law( I was a bad kid)
and a few other skills
The best thing you can teach your kid is
to be ethical, but greedy.
Give a man fish vs. teach him how to fish sort of thing.
What an idiot. For $400 a month he gave up his life and left the states? Could he not deliver some pizza two nights a week until he paid back his loan? Get training in another field to earn a living? What a total idiot I am glad he is left the country and I hope he never has kids…
With all due respect, how did you calculate that menial labor would support a person, physically, with $400 extra discretionary income.
You either come from a better era, a better location, or a better frame of mind, than me.
No-one holds a gun to these people’s heads? You’re kidding me! The system holds a gun to these kids’ heads. They dictate and educate that you can’t get by without a degree. They then make affordable education all but obsolete. They then give out loans to mainly kids that have no real financial education because guess what, simple financial planning courses are far less important than calculus and geometry.
This is the Grapes of Wrath novel for the new millenia.
This is not the fault of people that are brought up in a system to fit within the system. They are the sheep, but if they know no different can they really be blamed. Real education .. real life skills are what are needed!
“Real education .. real life skills are what are needed!” Yes, and teaching such is called parenting.
“a degree in public relations”
WTF is that? Someone is paid for the below? “May prepare and arrange displays, and make speeches”.
Engage in promoting or creating good will for individuals, groups, or organizations by writing or selecting favorable publicity material and releasing it through various communications media. May prepare and arrange displays, and make speeches.
My son is an electrician; that’s a job.
-Public relations-
The “trade” invented by Eddie Bernays.
jrs said, bernays. I thought this was a clever post.
Also, whenever someone gets paid hundreds of thousands, to give a mundane, promotional speech. (Money laundering.) It’s the shuck-and-jive of white collar criminals.
“A degree in public relations”
“WTF is that?”
One of many fields of study that doesn’t always transition into the real world..
Retail stores are full of Psychology,Sociology,Sports Management,Music,Art,and “studies” majors,simply because they are unable to find a job in their field of study..The belief that a college diploma automatically means a lifetime of higher wage earnings compared to a person without a college diploma is a myth;It all depends on the field of study..Some of the wealthiest people I know never attended college and only have a HS diploma..Oftentimes it’s not so much what you know,but rather who you know..
If the kid is a teen who completed a 4 year degree in anything before the age of 20 they are capable of doing something worthwhile and gainful. I suspect the individual is in their 20s and “a teen” is just an euphemism for someone relatively young.
Tuition should be based on what skills are needed at the time and near future. Doctors, nurses and manufacturing skills get free tuition. Political science and lawyers pay triple.
My attitude —
A valid use for credit, is as a medium of exchange. Can anyone literally afford to pay for this, or must we compete with every highly-irresponsible borrower.
The college probably can’t justify it’s existence, based on credit worthiness or the ability of the student to pay for these services, in the present job market.
It’s a speculative venture.
Someone can speculate on these unethical business models as the most likely way to support oneself.
Kevin,
That’s the first thing I noticed. How could he be 19 years old (or younger), have spent 4 years looking for a job, making him a college graduate at 15 years old. He would have to be a genius. Yet no one would hire him.
And a genius picks a subject which you, Kev pointed out is not a solid choice for anyone let alone a brain.
My children are creative. They also are very intelligent. They work in medicine, the arts, mechanics, law, and sales.
But they worked flipping burgers and waiting tables when they were young.
This guy sounds like a premadona who can’t sing a note. And this story reads like the creation of a dishonest journalist with an agenda.
.
Honeypot, I know what you mean by premadonas. There’s a few of those where I work and I avoid them all I can. I can’t stand such people.
“You can’t get by without a college degree.” BS with CAPITAL BS! I’ve survived without a college degree my whole life and know countless others who have also. Unless you’re going for something like medical or engineering a college degree is just toilet paper now. Once you sign those loan papers you made a commitment to pay back that money at some point. Someday those deadbeats will get nailed somehow. Then they want to blame everyone but themselves for their problems. I actually know some teens who rejected college in favor of some trade schools like auto or diesel mechanics, electrician, plumber, HVAC, etc. Things that are still in high demand. I’ll give those teens credit for doing some research and making sensible decisions. Those kids will be OK.
TDR,
Just a little correction on your BS.
I was a mathematics major for a time. The school I was in
had a policy that you could not get a BS in mathematics if
you ever got less than a “B” in a major class. I got a “C” in linear Algebra. I switched to Computer Science which is a heavily Math based discipline( which is why most American kids avoid it).
I earned good money building boats, I earned good money as a electronics technician, but I earned the most money as an engineer. Just for grins I calculated the benefit of ever hour I spent in a classroom. It came out to be over $20. I have no problem getting paid to go to school.
Sometimes that piece of paper opens a door that would otherwise be closed. My nephew has a BS in Economics and got a job selling commercial insurance. He, like his old man has a good line of shit and is very sociable. Right place right time Obama required many employers to buy medical insurance for their employees. My nephew now is a VP of sorts making $250K / yr. He is using the skills he learned from his dad not a bit of his college education but they demanded “a degree”. Me, largely self educated, Gold Seal in Stationary Engineering, can’t sell soap to the filthy but I’ll get a power plant up and running from cold.
This article irks me.
My daughter is in college and it is costing me $22,000.00 a year to send her there, and it is a state college, nothing fancy.
I am paying cash. And it took me a LONG time to save up to be able to do this for her.
Obama fucked us all on this. in 2009 he federalized all the student lending under Sallie Mae and gave out billions in student loans to people that would not have otherwise qualified for it. This created high demand for college as after high school enrollment went from about 47% to 73%. As we all know supply and demand, college prices skyrocketed.
And nothing has changed.
I find it outrageous that every entity in the US can file for bankruptcy protection, but those with student loans. Considering how fractional banking works, creating money out of thin air. With this in mind, only 8% of loans would have to be repaid for the bank to be profitable, depending on their reserve rate.
Didn’t anyone catch what the article said?
The article claims that in 2011 the guy was in his “teens” but in a later interview in 2019 with the NYT he is said to be 39 years old..
Evidently the article is BS,or this guy somehow figured out how to skip his 20’s.
Cry me a river. There should be a cap put on how much money that any individual can borrow for college/university.
Well, I’m glad that I’m not the only one pissed about this article. Considering that I am still paying off loans from a degree that I am not using.
That being said, I’ve got a bone to pick two years of interviews and nothing? What was the person in this article being overly picky? Working as a custodian, or any job that often gets snubbed too lowly? There’s jobs out there, and I know there comes the problem of making enough to start paying off the debt, but it is possible. Not to mention what did he think would happen, someone else picks up the tab, money falls from the sky? Suck it up and work on resolving your ‘mistake’ and learn from it, or at the very least change the views from needing a degree to something that’s more practical, and one can make a living off of.
I dropped out of a private school after a yr and a half because I ran out of money. And the school tried their damest to talk me into putting in for a student loan, nope, no thanks. I went to a local vo-tech yrs later to help with my job occupation ( maintenance in a packing house ).
It’s weak to run from responsibility.
As I have said many times, and as others have said in these comments, the majority of the blame falls squarely on the government for guaranteeing student loans. This makes it a no-lose proposition for the lenders. Naturally, since it quickly became known that student loans would be granted to anyone with a detectable pulse, prices took off into the troposphere. New “disciplines” and departments sprang up overnight (e.g., anything ending in “studies”) to entice the intellectually-challenged into college. And now the day of reckoning has come for the suckers and, guess what? The suckers are screaming for deliverance from their mostly self-made “debt prison” and refusing to take responsibility for being conned. And the government is going to forgive the bulk of these loans, thus exacerbating and perpetuating the problem.
Notice how any sort of government “amnesty” program always seems to make the underlying problems order of magnitude worse?
Good riddance. Please don’t return.
The best thing that you can do for your child is to teach him or her NEVER to be dependent on government.
The next thing to teach your children is that no one “owes” them a damn thing.
JD, can I hear an ‘Amen!’ And parents should never depend on government for ‘educating’ their children.
Why do students insist on debt? I earned the money for grad school before I started. I typed, answered phones, bought as little as possible. When I went back to college I found secretarial jobs on campus. Ended up with a Ph.D. and no debt. It can be done.
Education is a self-serving industrial complex just as predatory as the Pentagon. Just because they call it “learning” doesn’t mean they are nice.
Their job is to make maximum profits and to award those profits to the university executives, who all draw huge salaries and benefits. A wrinkle most students do not realise is this: all major universities turned themselves into hedge funds back in 2000. This means they play the markets and use their brand and their income stream, tuition fees and student debt, to leverage even more money to churn on the markets.
Universities are now ego driven coin sh#tting machines. And the students are the chumps in this Ponzi scheme.
A government that is over $20 trillion dollars in debt is involved in student loans, flood insurance, crop insurance, etc. Keep printing currency seems to be the only answer. Doesn’t all this make you sleep better at night?
“Are there no debtor prisons?”, “Are there no workhouses?”, are from Charles Dickens’ “Christmas Carol”. Real life is moving toward the fictional world. What’s next? I can think of some old “Twilight Zone” episodes that I wouldn’t want to become reality!
The point is to make college so unattractive and hyper-expensive, that no one will go. This will keep people particularly dumb and also make them want Socialism, where many things are deceivingly free. Since the TRIBE has so much money, it will be they who will attend college, and in the long run, they will become the Elite that all others will be indirectly forced to see as THE WISE ONES. In this way, they will be that much closer to realizing their true quest of TAKING OVER THE ENTIRE WORLD. This scheme is only one of dozens being used to achieve said goal. As long as our leaders are venal, this will continue.
I have some more bad news for old Chad. Just because he’s living in the Ukraine he hasn’t escaped either his debt nor his U.S. tax liability. Used to be when banks were your loan creditor you could weasel out of your obligation. Now that stone heart Uncle Sam is your creditor you’re screwed. The system never forgets. Did I mention it is linked to your passport also?
Ain’t technology grand.
So true. US citizens are the most tracked citizens on the planet apart from Chinese citizens. The US government always gets paid and will chase you to the ends of the earth to do so.
Ukraine is a bad choice because it data shares with the US and is a major US clown FOB. This idiot will pay back every penny.
When the govt. got into student loans it blew out of control and everyone that had one had to spend years paying it off or ignoring it. Why do you think healthcare is so expensive? Nothing is owed to these kids and they should know that. But leave the country over 400 a month? Loser! Nobody forced him to borrow so much and pick the major he had.
Degree in public relations? Worthless.
Was he hoping to work for the government and become a parasite like every other public official? Not contributing anything to the economic system. Paying taxes on money taken from someone else in the form of taxes is not producing.
Welcome to reality snowflake.
ukraine? not exactly the wealthiest, or most stable place in the world.
hope he does not have to get airlifted out by the marines in some sort of ‘conflict’, or full scale Russia vs Ukraine war. cos they WILL run his passport thru the computer. “i see you have an outstanding balance of $_______…”
either way, unless he has a non-USA passport, he’s going to have to visit the embassy in kiev to renew. unless he marries a local girl, i don’t picture the ukrainian government letting him stay in the country for life.
Story sounds bogus.
First, a minor can’t borrow money unless they are emancipated. They can’t legally enter most contracts.
Second, if he fled the country, odds are he’s not a teenager.
Something doesn’t add up.
He was born in 1980. He expatriated in 2007, thus making him 27 then. Whoever wrote the headline about a teenager clearly overpaid for their college degree.