Speaker 1: You're listening to Comedy Central.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about student debt. It's as American as milk.
Speaker 2: That isn't milk. Millions of Americans are college graduates, which
Speaker 2: is great. College provides you job skills, It exposes you
Speaker 2: to new ideas. It gives you a friend named Chad
Speaker 2: who's like a brother, even though he spilled bong water
Speaker 2: all inside your car. I love you, Chad, but you're
Speaker 2: a dick. But because America doesn't properly subsidize higher education
Speaker 2: like almost every other developed nation in the world, the
Speaker 2: number of Americans with student debt is higher now than
Speaker 2: ever before. And student debt is a lot like an STD. Yes,
Speaker 2: you can get it by accident in college, but then
Speaker 2: it follows you around for the rest of your life.
Speaker 2: And when I say the rest of your life, I
Speaker 2: mean it.
Speaker 3: There is a ticking time looming over the American economy.
Speaker 3: Nearly two trillion dollars in student loans owed by fifty
Speaker 3: million borrows. And this is not just a problem for
Speaker 3: younger Americans. Those over fifty years old have the fastest
Speaker 3: growing student loan debt burden of any andrew.
Speaker 4: Forty percent of Americans sixty five and older are in default,
Speaker 4: and Washington will collect by garnishing the social security of
Speaker 4: seniors in default. We met Sarafina Galante on the campus
Speaker 4: of San Diego State. Galante had to pause making payments
Speaker 4: four times for various life problems, but the bigger issue
Speaker 4: she got older. She can only work part time. Her
Speaker 4: monthly payment one hundred and seventy six dollars is income
Speaker 4: based and doesn't even cover the interest. This is going
Speaker 4: to follow you forever.
Speaker 2: This will follow me to my grave. Yeah, when you
Speaker 2: picture someone with student debt, you might think of the
Speaker 2: cost of girls, but you should be thinking of the
Speaker 2: cost of golden girls. Because eight million borrowers over fifty
Speaker 2: hold nearly a quarter of all federal student debts. And
Speaker 2: the craziest thing is some of them are even having
Speaker 2: their Social Security checks garnished to pay it off. And
Speaker 2: by the way, when they say garnished, it means the
Speaker 2: money is taken out of the check, right, They're not
Speaker 2: putting a little parsiley on the side of their checks
Speaker 2: to make it fancy. There's a terrifying situation to be
Speaker 2: and it's embarrassing. I mean, you heard that woman. Her
Speaker 2: loans might follow her to her grave. That is disgusting.
Speaker 2: When you're on your deathbed, you shouldn't be thinking about
Speaker 2: college loans. You know, you should be thinking of like
Speaker 2: a cool deathbed confession that will mess with your family
Speaker 2: when you're gone. You know, I'll just be like your
Speaker 2: real father is keep everybody guessing. The point is America
Speaker 2: needs solutions to the student debt crisis, and it could
Speaker 2: be canceling student loans. It could be guaranteeing free education.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It could even be punishing colleges if their graduates can't
Speaker 2: get the jobs that pay their loans. Yeah, I think
Speaker 2: that's actually an interesting idea. College would be like, oh,
Speaker 2: come on here, you'll get a job. You'll get a job,
Speaker 2: and then what happens if you don't. If I was
Speaker 2: a college dean, I'd be a lot more concerned about
Speaker 2: my students getting jobs and graduating. If otherwise, I'd have
Speaker 2: to let them move in with me. Then people will
Speaker 2: be committed, like, damn it, Chad, you're.
Speaker 5: Spilled bog water all over my fire. I love you,
Speaker 5: but you're a deck.
Speaker 2: Whatever the solution is, America cannot allow people to be
Speaker 2: so burdened by debt it follows them to the grave,
Speaker 2: especially because it would make for a very awkward reading
Speaker 2: of the will.
Speaker 6: Today, we'll be reading from the will of Stanley McCormick,
Speaker 6: who died at the age of eighty nine last month
Speaker 6: while having sex on a hot air balloon. That's how
Speaker 6: he wanted to go. Mister McCormick has left instructions for
Speaker 6: the distribution of his state. First, his life savings, all
Speaker 6: of which go to Brent.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry who Brent.
Speaker 6: As a tellection agent for your dad's student loans.
Speaker 2: Sorry for your loss.
Speaker 3: So dad was paying student loans for sixty years.
Speaker 2: He just had fifty more years to go, quorterbastard.
Speaker 6: Let's move on to the material last sets. The car
Speaker 6: has been left to Brent.
Speaker 3: I thought I was getting the tour cell.
Speaker 6: The residents located at one ten Pine Lane. Brent, score
Speaker 6: the family China set smuggled out of Poland at the
Speaker 6: dawn of.
Speaker 2: World War II.
Speaker 6: Don't say, Brent, Brent, come on, I don't even like China.
Speaker 7: Brent.
Speaker 1: Can we please have that one?
Speaker 5: It's really special to our family.
Speaker 2: Don't worry.
Speaker 6: This is going to bring the interest rate on his
Speaker 6: loan up to seven percent.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry it's going up to seven percent.
Speaker 1: Student loans are funny.
Speaker 6: Antique watch Brent, the pipe collection Brent, the.
Speaker 8: Beloved Banjoe, Brent, its keyboard tickets Brent, and finally his
Speaker 8: grandchildren's drawings, Brent.
Speaker 1: How are those going to pay down his loans?
Speaker 6: Turn this into an NFT and that covers everything he
Speaker 6: did not do well in life.
Speaker 4: That's for sure.
Speaker 3: Even though he went to college, we get nothing, didn't.
Speaker 6: You guys need granddad stuff to pay off your student loans.
Speaker 3: Shut up will help you, heavy road.
Speaker 2: There's one issue that all the major Democrats are talking about,
Speaker 2: student debts.
Speaker 9: It is one of the biggest issues right now on
Speaker 9: the campaign trail.
Speaker 7: Student loan debt affecting millions of Americans struggling to keep
Speaker 7: up with their payments.
Speaker 2: This is a national crisis. Student loan crisis.
Speaker 3: Student loan debt is something we have got to deal
Speaker 3: with as a priority. Elizabeth Warren is officially introducing a
Speaker 3: bill aimed at eliminating student debt for tens of millions
Speaker 3: of Americans.
Speaker 4: Bottom line is, we should not be punishing people for
Speaker 4: getting a higher education.
Speaker 1: It is time to hit the reset button.
Speaker 2: I love Bernie so much, man Hunt. This is a
Speaker 2: straight time to hit the reset button, which, by the way,
Speaker 2: is always what it looks like he's doing when he speaks.
Speaker 2: You know, it's just time to hit the reset.
Speaker 9: Hit the reset button on the WiFi, hit the reset buttons.
Speaker 2: On student debt, we have to hit every button with
Speaker 2: the NUM's lengths, all the buttons, all of the buttons,
Speaker 2: hit them all. But yes. The Democratic candidates, led by
Speaker 2: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are all proposing different ways
Speaker 2: to combat student debts. And the reason this is such
Speaker 2: a big issue is because America is drowning in student
Speaker 2: debts like never before.
Speaker 9: This year, student loan debt reached an all time high
Speaker 9: of one point four trillion dollars.
Speaker 2: Nearly seventy percent of students had to take out loans
Speaker 2: to make it through college. On average, each student graduated
Speaker 2: about thirty thousand dollars in debt.
Speaker 9: One of the things that makes student loan debt such
Speaker 9: a drag on the economy is that it's so hard
Speaker 9: to get rid of.
Speaker 2: That's right. In many ways, student debts is the new herpes.
Speaker 2: Almost everybody has its. It stays with you your whole life,
Speaker 2: and eventually you're gonna have to tell your fiance about it.
Speaker 2: You're like, so, there's this thing I picked up in college,
Speaker 2: And here's the thing. Student debt isn't just a financial burden.
Speaker 2: It's also making it hard for people to grow up.
Speaker 10: Nearly fifty percent of millennials have delayed buying a home
Speaker 10: or saving for retirement due to student loan debt. Seventeen
Speaker 10: percent have delayed getting married.
Speaker 3: The amount of adults in their late twenties living with
Speaker 3: their parents or grandparents.
Speaker 2: Is the highest it has been in over seventy five years.
Speaker 10: Living with his parents in Verona, New Jersey is not
Speaker 10: what twenty three year old Anthony DeCandia envisioned after graduating
Speaker 10: from college last year. But then again, he didn't being
Speaker 10: eighty thousand dollars in student debt either.
Speaker 5: Obviously, I love my family, I love the free food,
Speaker 5: and I love my dog.
Speaker 10: But I'm just ready to move on and live on
Speaker 10: my own.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Man, this kid is not special. He's not alone.
Speaker 2: Across the country, college grads are being forced to move
Speaker 2: back in with their parents because of crippling student debts.
Speaker 2: Even that dog, that dog wanted to move out, but
Speaker 2: he's still paying off loans from obedience school. Yeah, who's
Speaker 2: a broke boy. Who's a broke boy. It's not real debt.
Speaker 2: Calm down, he goes like, oh the debt of that dog.
Speaker 2: So student debt is seriously hampering the lives of young
Speaker 2: people across the United States.
Speaker 3: But before you.
Speaker 2: Start rolling your eyes that these whiny millennials, remember, just
Speaker 2: like herpes, student debt doesn't discriminate by age.
Speaker 10: Student loan debt is also crushing senior citizens.
Speaker 2: American sixty and over are carrying eighty six billion dollars
Speaker 2: in student loan debt.
Speaker 10: Baby boomers are paying off student loans into their sixty
Speaker 10: these seventies and beyond.
Speaker 6: Because of student loans, we are literally driving tens of
Speaker 6: thousands of older Americans into poverty.
Speaker 9: They will literally seize your Social Security benefit.
Speaker 1: Student loans are structured to be paid over a very
Speaker 1: long period of time. They have no statute of limitations,
Speaker 1: which means that they follow you. They can follow you
Speaker 1: till you die.
Speaker 2: God damn, student loans can follow you until you die.
Speaker 2: We hope that's where it stops. Oh, it would suck
Speaker 2: if you were still paying off your loans in heaven.
Speaker 2: You know, Jesus and Martin Luther King and junior are like, Hey,
Speaker 2: we gonna go ride unicorns.
Speaker 1: You wanna come?
Speaker 2: And you're like, oh, I can't. I got a worker
Speaker 2: shift at Blockbuster. Yeah go, I mean there's Blockbusters in heaven.
Speaker 2: That's that's where they are now, miss your Blockbuster. The
Speaker 2: point is. The point is student debt is affecting everyone,
Speaker 2: young people, old people, the village people. I mean, why
Speaker 2: do you think they were living at the YMCA. So
Speaker 2: whether you're a parent or a kid, there was a
Speaker 2: good chance that student debt is negatively affecting your quality
Speaker 2: of life because old people are losing social security and
Speaker 2: young adults are being forced to move back in. In fact,
Speaker 2: if something drastic doesn't change, it's going to reshape the
Speaker 2: American family forever, and it's going to reshape all of
Speaker 2: those family TV shows.
Speaker 5: He can't afford his student loans.
Speaker 2: He's got no job.
Speaker 5: He moved back home now his entire family.
Speaker 6: Hey, mom and Dad, I'm moving back home because I
Speaker 6: can't afford to pay my student loans.
Speaker 1: Sony will send us about the bone of balls.
Speaker 2: My unpaid bills.
Speaker 3: Love.
Speaker 9: That's a surprising new Bodley fluid you can sell for cash.
Speaker 2: Mom, Dad, there's a weird guy in my room.
Speaker 3: That's Pete.
Speaker 10: You have to subb your room to make ends meet.
Speaker 2: No, where I want my own room?
Speaker 1: You want to start paying rent?
Speaker 2: Hey, Pete, I call top book.
Speaker 7: Hey, I'm a school old debt collector.
Speaker 2: Open the door.
Speaker 1: Hey, get over here. Come on, dad, what are you
Speaker 1: doing here? You're not the only one with student loan debt.
Speaker 1: Your own damn spot stupid ass master's degree and but
Speaker 1: one way to get out of this student loan debt. Honey, don't.
Speaker 10: You know we can't afford the funeral.
Speaker 1: You make a great point, Hey.
Speaker 6: Dad, thanks for selling your kidney to pay off my
Speaker 6: student moms.
Speaker 1: It's nothing. I guess I love my kid more than
Speaker 1: my kid me.
Speaker 5: Oh, my guys are hungry.
Speaker 1: Wait man, stay, I'll we paid for that.
Speaker 2: Oh we didn't.
Speaker 10: It's liver.
Speaker 7: Jesus.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: Do you remember back in the day. Remember, back in
Speaker 1: the day, you'd be watching TV, flipping the channels, and
Speaker 1: then you'd see an ad for one of those for
Speaker 1: profit colleges. Be some dude in a T shirt in
Speaker 1: the parking lot telling you to get your shit together.
Speaker 1: First off, how are you gonna tell me to get
Speaker 1: my shit together? Your shirt ain't even got a collar
Speaker 1: brother or worse, They level up after a little while
Speaker 1: and get Master P's son to rap to us about education.
Speaker 5: Say ice DC College, I s DC college.
Speaker 4: Say ic DC, I'm still ICDC.
Speaker 1: Do you like reading?
Speaker 3: And shit?
Speaker 1: I think that's the first time a dude lost a
Speaker 1: rap battle to himself. But the thing is, people who
Speaker 1: graduated from these four profit schools are often drowning and
Speaker 1: dead or end up with a degree that nobody respects.
Speaker 1: The fact is, if you want a degree somebody respects, oh,
Speaker 1: you gotta get you one of these. Baby. This is
Speaker 1: my actual college degree, broadcast journalism bitches from a four.
Speaker 3: Year institution.
Speaker 1: Florida and four yer institution. Not that parking lot bullshit
Speaker 1: cost me about sixty thousand dollars should have been forty
Speaker 1: five thousand. But I flucked a year's school because I
Speaker 1: skipped school during mid terms to open for Tommy David's
Speaker 1: a true story. And you know what I love? This
Speaker 1: is this thing I love about college degrees. You ever
Speaker 1: notice when you get a college degree, your parents always
Speaker 1: want you to take a picture with them like they
Speaker 1: be cheesing super Look at my mama, Look at my mama.
Speaker 1: My mama smiling harder than me. You know, she's been
Speaker 1: in higher education for almost four decades, so you know
Speaker 1: she's happy about the degree. And I'm smiling too. To
Speaker 1: be fair, I'm smiling, but the only reason I'm smileingss
Speaker 1: because I ain't seen the invoice yet. But now the
Speaker 1: onth exalted four year college degree is starting to feel
Speaker 1: a lot like the parking lot of education. It's no
Speaker 1: wonder that people are starting to doubt the whole thing.
Speaker 9: More and more Americans are asking themselves is a.
Speaker 10: College degree still worth it?
Speaker 5: For high school senior Rains Lucas, his biggest challenge isn't
Speaker 5: getting into his dream schools, it's paying for them.
Speaker 2: It's just not sensible to go somewhere and take on
Speaker 2: hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
Speaker 9: Many topics executives are questioning the purpose of a college degree,
Speaker 9: including Elon Musk.
Speaker 3: There's no need even to have a college degree at all.
Speaker 1: Listen, you know it's bad when the dude who bought
Speaker 1: Twitter says college is a bad investment. That's one of
Speaker 1: my take a second forty four billion?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I was down ahead. Hold good joke.
Speaker 1: Now we've talked about abolishing the police and abolish in prisons.
Speaker 1: But I think it's time to ask an honest question,
Speaker 1: is it time to abolish college. We'll try to answer
Speaker 1: it in another installment of Long Story Short. There are
Speaker 1: a lot of problems with college. We can just stay
Speaker 1: that off the top. There's a lot of problems with college.
Speaker 1: You got annoying roommates, you got unfair professors. Sometimes, after
Speaker 1: a night of underaged a bunch of Jamaican nightclub bonus
Speaker 1: decide to pull a gun on you have a small
Speaker 1: disagreement over a cover charge to get in their establishment.
Speaker 1: Also a true story. But one of the main problems
Speaker 1: in recent years is that college has gotten way too expensive.
Speaker 1: From the time Prince had his ass cheeks out until
Speaker 1: when Megan the Stallion had her ass cheeks out, it
Speaker 1: is about forty years. The average cost of a college
Speaker 1: education has risen nearly five hundred percent. It's gotten so
Speaker 1: expensive that American kids need to flee the country just
Speaker 1: to get an education. With tuition prices soaring at home,
Speaker 1: American students are flocking to Europe for cheaper college options.
Speaker 9: There are at least forty four schools across Europe where
Speaker 9: Americans can earn their bachelor's degree for free. All public
Speaker 9: colleges in Germany, Iceland, Norway, and Finland are free for
Speaker 9: residents and international students.
Speaker 1: How crazy is it that studying abroad? Studying abroad that
Speaker 1: that used to be for rich kids. That was for
Speaker 1: pretentious rich people. Now if you're a baller, you need
Speaker 1: to go to school in America. Oh you studied in Berlin.
Speaker 1: You broke bitch. I went to the Ohio State University,
Speaker 1: puts Meet kevy Off. Well, it's bad enough that these
Speaker 1: degrees are so expensive, but what makes it worse is
Speaker 1: that they're not necessarily preparing you to earn the money back.
Speaker 1: Just one out of ten business leaders even believes that
Speaker 1: college graduates have the skills needed to work in their workplaces.
Speaker 1: And employers aren't the only ones questioning what colleges are teaching,
Speaker 1: so are the graduates themselves.
Speaker 7: Ever, wish you'd picked a different major back in college?
Speaker 7: Turns out, nearly two of every five American college grads
Speaker 7: regret the choice they made. Liberal arts majors are the
Speaker 7: most likely to harbor that deep regret. Nearly half of
Speaker 7: them say they wish they'd picked another field of study.
Speaker 9: What was your regretted major journalism?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: Mother, no, oh, don't zoom in on my pain. Come
Speaker 1: back up to my face. I have no regrets about
Speaker 1: going to the school and paying money to learn journalism
Speaker 1: just to get on the TV to play effect journalists.
Speaker 3: I have no regrets.
Speaker 7: I did real work.
Speaker 1: I did real journalism.
Speaker 3: Show I'm show them the work I put the supposed person.
Speaker 1: Brooke Wilson declined to speaker at Family forty six on
Speaker 1: camera about the events that led up to the hospitals
Speaker 1: impromptu inspection from Hopper. You telling me that wasn't real journalism,
Speaker 1: that was hard hitting journalism in my daddy's suit.
Speaker 10: The point is.
Speaker 1: I had to dig in the closet for the VHS
Speaker 1: to find them. The point is many college degrees aren't
Speaker 1: even setting you up for a career now. Now. Back
Speaker 1: in the day, it didn't really matter that much because
Speaker 1: just having a degree made you special. In nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: around eight percent of the population had a bachelor's degree,
Speaker 1: but today that numbers around forty percent. Having a college
Speaker 1: degree now is like having a keyless entry in your car.
Speaker 1: Everybody got it, anybody care. But in nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: you was the man, you had keyless entry in eighty
Speaker 1: or something.
Speaker 3: Hey what you just did?
Speaker 1: I locked my car?
Speaker 3: Do it again?
Speaker 1: Oh shit, you the devil. That's magic. So here's where
Speaker 1: we are. People. We got people spending more money than
Speaker 1: ever to get a degree that means less than ever,
Speaker 1: which has left people looking for alternatives. Some people are
Speaker 1: taking apprenticeships, some people are taking classes online, and some
Speaker 1: employers are saying, hell, we'll just train ourselves. In fact,
Speaker 1: Google has a fifty dollars month education service that they've
Speaker 1: used to place over seventy five thousand people into jobs
Speaker 1: at over one hundred and fifty different companies, jobs that
Speaker 1: Google will soon replace with AI. But that's not the point.
Speaker 1: It's a long story short. College is too expensive. It
Speaker 1: doesn't help you get a job. You can learn the
Speaker 1: same stuff on a computer, or in Iceland or Berlin.
Speaker 1: Half the employers will train you for free. This shit
Speaker 1: is a bigger scam than bitcoin. We should abolished college,
Speaker 1: held me. We got to abolish college. Man heys messing
Speaker 1: around with Hey mama, yes, ma'am, I know you've been
Speaker 1: in higher education for forty years. Mama, I know you March.
Speaker 1: You told me the stories. I know your money. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'll put the diploma back on the wall. Yes I
Speaker 1: won't talk bad about college. Yes'm okay. Side note, College
Speaker 1: is necessary, it broadens your horizons, and in spite of
Speaker 1: its cost, I'm an absolutely better man because of the
Speaker 1: degree and the invaluable lifelong friendships I made along the way.
Speaker 2: By.
Speaker 1: So maybe maybe we don't have to abolish college, but
Speaker 1: we need to find a way for its benefits to
Speaker 1: outweigh its costs. Because if a four year degree is
Speaker 1: going to leave you at crippling debt and people not
Speaker 1: respecting the degree, then maybe we all ohe parking lot
Speaker 1: t shirt man an apology because it seems like we're
Speaker 1: all victims of for profit education.
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