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Atlanta, georgia. in a few moments, president obama will deliver the commencement speech there. we ll bring it to you live. joining me now onset is a combined total of $136,000 in real and projected student debt. they have real names. brittany just graduated from syracuse university with $10,000 in debt. she s going on to get her masters degree in social work and public health. that will put her post secondary debt at $100,000. and victoria who graduates friday from mary mont manhattan college with a degree in communications. her grand total of college debt will be about $36,000. so ladies, how you feeling? excited. okay. tell me. that makes you a millenial. you re not even nervous about the $30,000. oh, auto i m nervous. who knows what s happening to me. i have this debt and no full-time job post the summer. who knows how that s being paid. ....
Got into graduate school, yes i got into columbia. yes i got $90,000 of debt coming. i want to be clear. you were doing without parental support. you re not in a family circumstance where you have parents who could be writing these checks for you. yeah. so i was undergrad, i was lucky to be a part of a program for a students that are disenfranchised or do not have the financial support that supported me through my years in college. a lot of the loans i had to take were for living expenses. you have to pay to stay at college, pay to eat. i had to take those. when coming to graduate school the same thing happens. everyone is an independent student. but for me, it s like i still don t have that support. so i m taking out loans for just medicine and things like that. andy, you looking at two young women going out into this job market. this is the kind of students that you work with all the time. is there key advice that you would give them as they re thinking forward about the next ....
It s not that easy. if we can encourage students to make connections, good innings will happen. so dorian, part of what i realize as i listen to andy, i went to wake forest, small undergraduate institution where people are going to talk to you, counsel you, you ll get advice about it. when you look at the numbers around debt and borrowing, the fact that it is happening basically at the walmart of colleges, at these for-profit schools where 96% of their students are taking out loans, then a quarter of them are defaulting and guess who picks up the tab. again, we re underwriting, right, the for-profit schools. how do we make it clear to students consumers in the market just how problematic it is to attend those sorts of schools with debt? bankruptly laws, the only debt you can t unload is student loan, you can unload mortgage debt, credit card debt. we re literally trapping in a cast system today s students. i think what we need to convince ....
Attorney. but there are four crimes with no statute of limitations. murder, war crimes, kidnapping, treason and now student loan debt. what does that say about us as a people? i will say this. like you, i have student loan debt and next month, i m proud to announce that i will make the final payment on my student loan debt at the age of 44. it represents an economic disaster, look at the ravages of paying off student loan debt at the age of 44. valerie, you re the millenial at the table at least at the moment. what does this do as you sort of look out into your future? i think the class of 2013 will make it if we embody the greatest parts of our generation. the greatest qualities of our generation and we organize. i spend almost every week on another college campus. what i m hearing is that students are incredibly sober in the face of this debt, in the face of the job market. in the face of washington gridlock. somehow they remain optimistic and confident. pragmatic. we re ready to ....
Graduates is that they need to organize. oh. they need to organize and join forces with senator warren and say, something has to fundamentally change in terms of how our system of higher education operates in this country. the increasing debt is unsustainable. we re putting a whole new generation of folks in lifetime debt before they even get started. i think the only way around that is to organize and say no, no, no, something has to change. lower interest rates. how about we forgive that debt. that would help the economy, actually. scott, is that a possibility. i like the idea of imagining the milien he wills in their own movement that deeply impacts them and also have enormous possibilities on student loan debt is a clear and present danger to the american economy. we did original research at one wisconsin now. what we found was that if you have a student loan debt, you are two-thirds more likely to own a used car as opposed to a new car. ....