Posted on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011.
Want To Be An Indentured Servant? Take Out A Student Loan.
It’s very frustrating to me to read articles, even articles written by financial advisers, extolling the benefits of student loans. I see advice columns proclaiming that student loans are a fantastic opportunity for students that otherwise would not have the ability for higher education college degrees, vocational school, and so on, and so on. Well, to me student loans are little more than another form of indentured servitude.
Indentured Servitude
Let’s take a look at a little history. Indentured servants became very common in colonial America when landowners wanted a cheap source of labor to work their land. One way to find relatively cheap labor was to offer to pay an immigrant’s passage in exchange for a commitment to work on the land without pay for a period of years. At the time there were many European, mostly British, citizens who were poor but willing to work hard for the promise of a better life. Unfortunately, travel across the Atlantic was very expensive.
