Did You Know That a Soft Degree Won’t Support Paying Off Your Student Loan
Debt?
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You may not know this, but not all college degrees are created equally. Alarmingly, certain college degrees will
never support paying off the student loan debt required to pay for the
degree.
We classify those degrees as being, “Soft degrees.”
In finance the term “Soft” is used to describe a market condition. It means declining in value, volume,
profitability, etc.
An example would be, there is a soft market for mailroom managers support and an even softer market for Windows
98 tech.
In other words, if a person were to get a college degree related to rendering Windows 98 tech support or
becoming a mailroom manager, their degree would be essentially worthless.
Granted, those two illustrations are elementary, but don’t allow those rudimentary examples throw you for a
loop.
Be certain of this; when you ascribe to attend college, do not make the mistake of acquiring a soft degree
unless you are paying cash and unless the degree is clearly going to be perfunctory.
If you are aspiring to graduate from college with a marketable degree, you will need to perform an educational
analysis before you sign on the dotted line. The objective of this analysis is to insure that you are not falling
for a soft degree. Your detailed analysis should be broken down into these probative questions.
What Will Be The Total Cost Of This Degree Upon Graduation? You need to tabulate the TOTAL
cost of the degree. That means you will factor in: tuition, books, room and board and any and all other extraneous
fees. If you are unsure of the costs and extra fees, do your homework and research and find out! Don’t be
blindsided by costs that you did not account for.
Once you know the cost of the degree, you can then begin the process of determining if you are errantly aiming
for a soft degree or properly targeting a marketable degree.
What Are The Projections For This Career Path The Next Five Years From Now? I hope you are
paying close attention to the marketplace. If you are, you will comprehend this sobering fact; jobs that existed
seven to eight years ago are nowhere to be found these days.
The people who sweated over the degrees, certifications and training related to those jobs, in many cases, have
to start over from scratch. It’s like their degrees are patently worthless.
Those who got into the high paying careers such as legal research are finding themselves being replaced by
computer systems that can perform the exact same research it used to take an army of paralegals and attorneys to
perform. Computers are even replacing certain vaunted engineering jobs.
Here are a number of other careers that were once highly esteemed but are now seeing a rapid demise: newspaper
reporters, fashion designers, economists and insurance underwriters. This is why it is imperative that you exercise
due diligence and learn what the marketplace needs and conversely no has little to no need for.
What Are The Employment Statistics For People With This Type Of Degree? In virtually every
career field you can find the statistics for hiring. A good place to start is the (BLS) Bureau of Labor Statistics.
You want to look for and identify hiring patterns, freezes in hiring, drop offs in hiring and changes in a targeted
career field that greatly diminishes the value of a degree pointed at that type of career.
What Is The Average Starting Salary Of a Person With This Type Of Degree? Why is this
crucial? Because it is going to determine how the numbers pan out in real life. If you look at the starting salary
of a certain career path and the starting salary is only sufficient enough to allow you to find a place to live,
take care of transportation, get Internet access, pay your utilities, get denta,l auto and health insurance, eat in
and buy a few clothing articles and that’s it, you have to be very careful about taking on student loan debt.
If a potential starting salary will only cover the basic necessities of life, adding student loan debt to the
mix is a sure recipe for financial and economic disaster! This is a prime reason why so many graduates end up
defaulting on their student loans;
they didn’t engage in forward thinking and real time economic analysis. Grab this information NOW! Mull over it
NOW! You can start you research at sites like, Payscale.com, Salarylist.com, Salary.com and Monster.com.
What Are The Salaries of People With The Degree After Two Years, Three Years, Etc.? This
goes back to engaging in more forward thinking. You want to analyze the salary increases or lack thereof, of your
predecessors. Do you see a steady increase each year? Every two years? Is the pay of people on this career path
frozen in time? The worst time to find out that you won’t be seeing any pay increases is when your student loan
payments are past due.
Is There Room For Advancement And Growth With This Type Of Degree? Career wise, nothing
could hurt more than to choose a career and the moment right after you start working for a company, you realize
that it is a dead end job. How does the average graduate find out they are on a dead end career? After they get
hired and the giddy feeling subsides, they start listening to fellow employees and they start assessing their
chances of advancement.
After more intense checking, they start to see a incontrovertible pattern; people in the career path they chose
have a habit of switching careers. That is an ominous sign they should have been detected prior to the day they
started college.
If you employ all six of these probative questions and perform your due diligence research, you can avoid the
train wreck called massive student loan debt. Actually, if you perform this research, you will avoid the student
debt nightmare altogether. Don’t end up like so many other disgruntled college graduates who now vehemently swear
and rail against acquiring a quality college education.
They had no idea that they just graduated with a soft degree that was infinitely useless the moment they started
pursing it. REMEMBER: Time is of the essence! These are steps you take prior to enrolling in college. You need to
start thinking about, planning and monitoring your educational game plan NOW!
Brad Matheson is a professional Financial Consultant who specializes in helping businesses and individuals
resolve their debt issues. He believes that all debt problems can be solved with the right debt advice and aspires
to help Americans learn all of their debt options and exercise all of their rights. Says, Matheson, “Don't allow
the Student Loan Debt crisis or a Defaulted Student Loan to hinder or block your
career aspirations or stymie your financial dreams, There is Student Loan Help
available!”
Source: http://studentloanwhiz.com/
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