One third of 'millennials' regret going to college

By Rick Moran

What they "regret" is financing their four year hiatus from reality with student loans.

Here's an indication of how burdensome student loans have become: About one-third of millennials say they would have been better off working, instead of going to college and paying tuition.

That's a according to a new Wells Fargo WFC +0.57% study which surveyed 1,414 millennials between the ages of 22 and 32. More than half of them financed their education through student loans, and many say the if they had $10,000 the "first thing" they'd do is pay down their student loan or credit card debt.

That's no surprise when you consider student borrowing topped the $100 billion threshold for the first time in 2010, and total outstanding loans exceeded $1 trillion for the first time in 2011. Student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt in the U.S. which stands at about $798 billion.

Delinquencies are also on the rise. The number of borrowers who are at least 90 days late on student loan payments has jumped from 8.5% in 2011 to 11.7% today, according to a study by the New York Federal Reserve.

The problem sometimes is that not all college educations are worth their cost since they can't guarantee a high-paying job to help pay off that student debt. A report from the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys says the rising student debt problem can have a bad impact on the economy. Even in the best of economic times when jobs are plentiful, young people with considerable debt burdens end up delaying life-cycle events such as buying a car, purchasing a home, getting married and having children.

We are heading for the biggest bailout of them all - forgiving student loan debt. Well - it wouldn't exactly be "forgiveness." Someone is going to have to pay the banks something - pennies on the dollar probably - and that someone is you and me. Perhaps the government will try to emulate Cyprus and take it out of bank depositors' accounts. It's hard to envision the federal government coming up with hundreds of billions of dollars in bail out cash without trying to stick it to "the rich."

Bottom line: College isn't for everybody and taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt before you can legally buy a drink is idiotic.